  We introduce the General Index of Software Engineering Papers, a dataset of
fulltext-indexed papers from the most prominent scientific venues in the field
of Software Engineering. The dataset includes both complete bibliographic
information and indexed ngrams (sequence of contiguous words after removal of
stopwords and non-words, for a total of 577 276 382 unique n-grams in this
release) with length 1 to 5 for 44 581 papers retrieved from 34 venues over the
1971-2020 period.The dataset serves use cases in the field of meta-research,
allowing to introspect the output of software engineering research even when
access to papers or scholarly search engines is not possible (e.g., due to
contractual reasons). The dataset also contributes to making such analyses
reproducible and independently verifiable, as opposed to what happens when they
are conducted using 3rd-party and non-open scholarly indexing services.The
dataset is available as a portable Postgres database dump and released as open
data.
