From its early foundations in the 1970s, empirical software engineering (ESE) has evolved into a mature research discipline that embraces a plethora of different topics, methodologies, and industrial practices. Despite its remarkable progress, the ESE research field still needs to keep evolving, as new impediments, shortcoming, and technologies emerge. Research reproducibility, limited external validity, subjectivity of reviews, and porting research results to industrial practices are just some examples of the drivers for improvements to ESE research. Additionally, several facets of ESE research are not documented very explicitly, which makes it difficult for newcomers to pick them up. With this new regular ACM SIGSOFT SEN column (SEN-ESE), we introduce a venue for discussing meta-aspects of ESE research, ranging from general topics such as the nature and best practices for replication packages, to more nuanced themes such as statistical methods, interview transcription tools, and publishing interdisciplinary research. Our aim for the column is to be a place where we can regularly spark conversations on ESE topics that might not often be touched upon or are left implicit. Contributions to this column will be grounded in expert interviews, focus groups, surveys, and position pieces, with the goal of encouraging reflection and improvement in how we conduct, communicate, teach, and ultimately improve ESE research. Finally, we invite feedback from the ESE community on challenging, controversial, or underexplored topics, as well as suggestions for voices you would like to hear from. While we cannot promise to act on every idea, we aim to shape this column around the community interests and are grateful for all contributions.

翻译：自20世纪70年代早期奠定基础以来，实证软件工程（ESE）已发展成为一个成熟的研究领域，涵盖了众多不同的主题、方法论和工业实践。尽管取得了显著进展，但随着新的障碍、不足和技术的出现，ESE研究领域仍需持续演进。研究可复现性、有限的外部效度、评审的主观性以及研究成果向工业实践的转化，仅仅是推动ESE研究改进的部分驱动因素。此外，ESE研究的若干方面并未得到非常明确的记录，这使得新手难以掌握。通过这个新的ACM SIGSOFT SEN常规专栏（SEN-ESE），我们引入了一个讨论ESE研究元层面的平台，其范围涵盖从一般性主题（如复制包的性质与最佳实践）到更细微的主题（如统计方法、访谈转录工具以及跨学科研究的发表）。本专栏旨在成为一个我们可以定期就那些不常被提及或隐含的ESE话题展开对话的场所。专栏的投稿将基于专家访谈、焦点小组、调查和立场文章，其目标是鼓励对我们如何进行、交流、教授并最终改进ESE研究进行反思与提升。最后，我们邀请ESE社区就具有挑战性、争议性或尚未充分探索的主题提供反馈，并提出您希望听到的声音建议。虽然我们无法承诺采纳每一个想法，但我们旨在围绕社区兴趣来塑造本专栏，并对所有贡献表示感激。