A historical dataset of software engineering conferences

The Mining Software Repositories community typically focuses on data from software configuration management tools, mailing lists, and bug tracking repositories to uncover interesting and actionable information about the evolution of software systems. However, the techniques employed and the challenges faced when mining are not restricted to these types of repositories. In this paper, we present an atypical dataset of software engineering conferences, containing historical data about the accepted papers and the composition of programme committees for eleven well-established conferences. The dataset (published on Github at https://github.com/tue-mdse/conferenceMetrics) can be used, e.g., by conference steering committees or programme committee chairs to assess their selection process and compare against other conferences in the field, or by prospective authors to decide in which conferences to publish.