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 a helpful resource -- whereas a general Google search may yield you a range of opinions, looking at academic articles will give you a sense of what people find when they take a more rigorous approach. You can filter by year and 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).

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.

Online communities in general

ICWSM
CHI
CSCW
AOIR
Transactions on Social Computing
GROUP

Software engineering focused, but often include social/community aspects

ICSE - especially 'ICSE-SEIS' -- SEIS is 'Software Engineering in Society'
ICSA
OpenSym
MSR
SANER
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" and "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"
HICCS
USENIX