Six reasons for rejecting an industrial survey paper

Despite their importance in any empirically based research program, industrial surveys are not very common in the software engineering literature. In our experience, a possible reason is their difficulty of publication. We would like to understand what are the issues that may prevent the publication of papers reporting industrial surveys. In this preliminary work, we analyzed the surveys we conducted and extracted the main lessons learned in terms of issues and problems. Most common critics posed to industrial surveys are: lack of novelty, limitation of the geographic scope and sampling issues. Most objections that led to reject a survey paper actually are not easy to overcome and others are not so serious. These objections could restrain researchers from conducting this type of studies that represent an important methodological asset. For these reasons, we think that reviewers should be less severe to judge survey papers provided that all the limitations of the study are well explained and highlighted.