  The purpose of scholarly peer review is to evaluate the quality of scientific
manuscripts. However, study after study demonstrates that peer review neither
effectively nor reliably assesses research quality. Empirical standards attempt
to address this problem by modelling a scientific community's expectations for
each kind of empirical study conducted in that community. This should enhance
not only the quality of research but also the reliability and predictability of
peer review, as scientists adopt the standards in both their researcher and
reviewer roles. However, these improvements depend on the quality and adoption
of the standards. This tutorial will therefore present the empirical standard
for mining software repositories, both to communicate its contents and to get
feedback from the attendees. The tutorial will be organized into three parts:
(1) brief overview of the empirical standards project; (2) detailed
presentation of the repository mining standard; (3) discussion and suggestions
for improvement.
