Community research venues

Finding research

One approach to making use of research in communities is to keep an eye on specific conferences and journals that publish this type of work. Some of these publishing outlets are open access, and often pre-prints are available (i.e. a free 'just-before-published' copy). You can scan the titles and abstracts for work of interest and then dig up the article, a blog post related to the article, or a video of the work being presented. The authors of the work will (almost) always be thrilled to hear from you if you reach out to ask a question or request a copy of the article.

Finding answers

If you have a specific question and want to understand the evidence associated with that question, you might find Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar helpful resources -- whereas a general search may yield a range of opinions, these search engines focus almost exclusively on academic research. Looking at academic articles will give you a sense of what people find when they take a more rigorous approach.

Some generic search tips:

• Try out advanced search features to help narrow your searches.
• You can filter by year or look only at recent years.
• For key phrases or technical terms, make use of quotation marks. For example, a search like "code of conduct" diversity "open source" might help inform a discussion on whether codes of conduct in open source projects have a role to play in increasing diversity (short answer: a CoC can help, but it's not a guarantee).
• Different research fields often use (slightly) different terms to talk about (nearly) the same thing. For example, you might be interested in finding work on codes of conduct in free software communities and projects. However, the search you ran for "code of conduct" only turns up a handful of results. You might look through these results to see if the papers or their references suggest alternative keywords or key phrases and search those as well. In this example, phrases like "online community governance", "online community rules", "online community norms" might help you identify some different sources (which you can then use to repeat the same strategy).

Venues and sources

Here are some places that publish research about online communities. Trolling through their annual programs or journal issues is one way to keep up to date on research findings. Generally there will be a link to a list of accepted papers, or a set of links to various categories of accepted papers, or a link to a program. The lists of sample titles are in no way exhaustive but perhaps give a sense of the kinds of work that might be found in a given publication.

Online communities

• ICWSM -- International conference on web and social media Sample titles:
  • Why do people participate in small online communities?
  • Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines
• CHI -- ACM Computer-Human Interaction. Sample titles:
  • Coordination and Collaboration: How do Volunteer Moderators Work as Team in Live Streaming Communities?
  • Community Resilience: Quantifying the Disruptive Effects of Sudden Spikes in Activity within Online Communities
  • ARMY's Magic Shop: Understanding the Collaborative Construction of Playful Places in Online Communities
  • Follow the Leader: Technical and Inspirational Leadership in Open Source Software
• CSCW -- ACM Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Sample titles:
  • More than a Modern Day Green Book: Exploring the Online Community of Black Twitter
  • Many Destinations, Many Pathways: A Quantitative Analysis of Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Scratch
  • The Signals that Potential Contributors Look for When Choosing Open-source Projects
• AOIR -- Association of Internet Researchers. Sample titles:
  • Digital Traces, Social Residues: Usage as self-representation on lifestyle apps
  • Archiving the Insurrection: The case of r/Datahoarder
• Transactions on Social Computing Sample titles:
  • Helping Each Other Quit Online: Understanding User Engagement and Real-life Outcomes of the r/StopSmoking Digital Smoking Cessation Community
  • An Investigation of the Portrayal of Social Media Challenges on YouTube and Twitter
• Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Sample titles:
  • A Trade-off-centered Framework of Content Moderation
  • Quarantined! Examining the Effects of a Community-Wide Moderation Intervention on Reddit
• GROUP -- ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work. Sample titles:
  • Communication Channels and their Challenges: an Analysis of Software Development Teams during the COVID-19 Pandemic
  • Collaborative behavior and winning challenges in Competitive Software Crowdsourcing
• HICCS -- Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Sample titles:
  • Towards Automated Moderation: Enabling Toxic Language Detection with Transfer Learning and Attention-Based Models
  • Achieving Success in Community Crowdsourcing: Lessons from the Field
  • Are Deep Learning-Generated Social Media Profiles Indistinguishable from Real Profiles?

Software engineering focused, but often include social/community aspects

• ICSE - especially 'ICSE-SEIS' -- ICSE is International Conference on Software Engineering and SEIS is 'Software Engineering in Society'. Sample titles:
  • Gender Representation Among Contributors to Open-Source Infrastructure - An Analysis of 20 Package Manager Ecosystems
  • Hackathons as Inclusive Spaces for Prototyping Software in Open Social Innovation with NGOs
  • Rules of Engagement: Why and How Companies Participate in OSS
• OpenSym -- International Symposium on Open Collaboration. Sample titles:
  • How to characterize the health of an Open Source Software project? A snowball literature review of an emerging practice
  • Efficient Prior Publication Identification for Open Source Code
  • Challenges of Using Hugging Face Deep Learning Framework in an Enterprise Environment
• MSR -- Mining Software Repositories (i.e. learning about software and software communities using the repository as evidence.). Sample titles:
  • An exploratory study of bug introducing changes: what happens when bugs are introduced in open source software?
  • Understanding issues related to personal data and data protection in open source projects on GitHub
• SANER IEEE Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering. Sample titles:
  • Identifying Emergent Leadership in Open Source Software Projects Based on Communication Styles
  • HFCommunity: A Tool to Analyze the Hugging Face Hub Community
• ICSME -- This is the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution. Sample titles:
  • What Makes a Good Code Example? A Study of Programming Q&A in StackOverflow
  • On the Use of GitHub Actions in Software Development Repositories
• ESEC-FSE -- This is the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the foundations of Software Engineering. Sample titles:
  • A Case Study of Implicit Mentoring, Its Prevalence, and Impact in Apache
  • Corporate Dominance in Open Source Ecosystems: A Case Study of OpenStack
  • Tracking Patches for Open Source Software Vulnerabilities
• The Linux Foundation. Sample titles:
  • The business value of the OSPO
  • Measuring the economic value of open source
  • Mentorship in open source