  Empirical Standards are natural-language models of a scientific community's
expectations for a specific kind of study (e.g. a questionnaire survey). The
ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative generated empirical
standards for research methods commonly used in software engineering. These
living documents, which should be continuously revised to reflect evolving
consensus around research best practices, will improve research quality and
make peer review more effective, reliable, transparent and fair.
