Influential Software Engineering Papers
Note: This webpage is the software-engineering counterpart of TopNotch by Konrad Rieck, which ranked security papers until September 2025, when Google Scholar began blocking automated crawling. Paper lists come from DBLP; citation counts are taken from Semantic Scholar, cross-checked against OpenAlex (and Google Scholar for strong disagreements), so all numbers share one scale and clear record-merge errors are corrected by hand. Beyond each venue's main research track, the ranking also covers its other peer-reviewed tracks (Industry, NIER, SEIP/SEIS, ERA, Mining Challenge, tool demonstrations, and more), labeled per paper; co-located workshops are excluded. Papers that received a Distinguished/Best Paper, Most Influential Paper, or Test-of-Time award are marked with a 🏆 badge. Each entry names the source of its count.
This webpage is an attempt to assemble a ranking of top-cited papers from the area of software engineering. The ranking is automatically created based on citations of papers published at top software engineering venues. Conferences and journals are ranked separately. In particular, the ranking is based on the four tier-1 conferences
the following tier-2 conferences
and the following journals
Top of the Notch
Absolute citations are not necessarily a good indicator for the impact of a paper, as the number of citations usually grows with the age of a paper. The primary ranking therefore normalizes the citations of each paper by its age, comparing it against the average of its publication year. Papers from 2026 are not included in the normalized rankings, as their citation counts have not stabilized yet.
Conference papers normalized by age ⌄
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1
Islem Bouzenia, Premkumar T. Devanbu, and Michael Pradel:
RepairAgent: An Autonomous, LLM-Based Agent for Program Repair.
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2025
6373% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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2
Yangruibo Ding, Yanjun Fu, Omniyyah Ibrahim, Chawin Sitawarin, Xinyun Chen, Basel Alomair, David A. Wagner, Baishakhi Ray, and Yizheng Chen:
Vulnerability Detection with Code Language Models: How Far Are We?
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2025
4443% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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3
Chunqiu Steven Xia, Yinlin Deng, Soren Dunn, and Lingming Zhang:
Demystifying LLM-Based Software Engineering Agents.
ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2025
🏆 Distinguished Paper
3537% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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4
David Harel, Hagi Lachover, Amnon Naamad, Amir Pnueli, Michal Politi, Rivi Sherman, and Aharon Shtull-Trauring:
STATEMATE; A Working Environment for the Development of Complex Reactive Systems.
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 1988
3437% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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5
Daye Nam, Andrew Macvean, Vincent J. Hellendoorn, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Brad A. Myers:
Using an LLM to Help With Code Understanding.
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2024
3390% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
→ Check out the normalized conference top-100 ranking
The following list shows the corresponding ranking by absolute citation counts.
Top-cited conference papers from 1976 to 2026 ⌄
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1
Koushik Sen, Darko Marinov, and Gul Agha:
CUTE: A Concolic Unit Testing Engine for C.
ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2005
🏆 Distinguished Paper
2871% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
-
2
René Just, Darioush Jalali, and Michael D. Ernst:
Defects4J: A Database of Existing Faults to Enable Controlled Testing Studies for Java Programs.
ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA): Tool Demonstrations, 2014
🏆 ISSTA Impact Paper
2844% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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3
Sebastian G. Elbaum, Alexey G. Malishevsky, and Gregg Rothermel:
Prioritizing Test Cases for Regression Testing.
ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), 2000
2228% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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4
Matthew B. Dwyer, George S. Avrunin, and James C. Corbett:
Patterns in Property Specifications for Finite-State Verification.
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 1999
2038% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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5
Peri L. Tarr, Harold Ossher, William H. Harrison, and Stanley M. Sutton Jr.:
N Degrees of Separation: Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns.
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 1999
🏆 ICSE Most Influential Paper
2010% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
→ Check out the conference top-100 ranking
Top of the Notch: Journals
Journal papers normalized by age ⌄
-
1
Xinyi Hou, Yanjie Zhao, Yue Liu, Zhou Yang, Kailong Wang, Li Li, Xiapu Luo, David Lo, John Grundy, and Haoyu Wang:
Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review.
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2024
5573% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
-
2
Barry W. Boehm:
Software Engineering Economics.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 1984
3586% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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3
Junjie Wang, Yuchao Huang, Chunyang Chen, Zhe Liu, Song Wang, and Qing Wang:
Software Testing With Large Language Models: Survey, Landscape, and Vision.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 2024
3032% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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4
Per Runeson and Martin Höst:
Guidelines for Conducting and Reporting Case Study Research in Software Engineering.
Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2009
2612% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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5
Max Schäfer, Sarah Nadi, Aryaz Eghbali, and Frank Tip:
An Empirical Evaluation of Using Large Language Models for Automated Unit Test Generation.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 2024
2585% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
→ Check out the normalized journal top-100 ranking
Top-cited journal papers from 1984 to 2026 ⌄
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1
Barry W. Boehm:
Software Engineering Economics.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 1984
3586% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
-
2
Gerard J. Holzmann:
The Model Checker SPIN.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 1997
2178% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
-
3
Per Runeson and Martin Höst:
Guidelines for Conducting and Reporting Case Study Research in Software Engineering.
Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2009
2612% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
-
4
Liangzhao Zeng, Boualem Benatallah, Anne H. H. Ngu, Marlon Dumas, Jayant Kalagnanam, and Henry Chang:
QoS-Aware Middleware for Web Services Composition.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 2004
1697% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
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5
Shyam R. Chidamber and Chris F. Kemerer:
A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 1994
1856% above average of year
Visited: Sep-2026
→ Check out the journal top-100 ranking
The Last Decades
If you are interested in a more detailed breakdown of top-cited papers over time, you can find rankings for the last decades here:
Conferences:
Journals:
Limitations
As with any ranking, the presented results do not necessarily reflect the true impact of a paper. Citations are only one metric to assess the reception of a paper and are insufficient to characterize all aspects contributing to the relevance of scientific work. Moreover, the underlying data may contain errors or missing information. Errare humanum est.
Contact
This webpage follows the design and methodology of TopNotch by Konrad Rieck. If you have questions, comments, complains, or ideas how to improve this webpage, feel free to reach out to Jieke Shi.