ICSE 2020 paper is the most cited according to 2025 Scholar Metrics

I’m happy to share that, according to the 2025 Scholar Metrics:

• Our paper “Empirical Review of Automated Analysis Tools on 47,587 Ethereum Smart Contracts” (T. Durieux, J.F. Ferreira, R. Abreu, P. Cruz – ICSE 2020) is the most cited paper from ICSE!

• And our paper “SmartBugs: A Framework to Analyze Solidity Smart Contracts” (J.F. Ferreira, P. Cruz, T. Durieux, R. Abreu – ASE 2020) is the fourth most cited paper from ASE!

This achievement is special to me because it all started with my first MSc supervision at Instituto Superior Técnico, with Pedro Cruz.

It began as a simple idea: Pedro needed to evaluate his proposed work, but we realized there were no proper datasets of smart contracts. So we built one. Then we thought: what if we created a framework to automatically compare tools on this dataset? That’s how SmartBugs was born!

When the first version of SmartBugs was working, the next step was obvious: a large-scale empirical evaluation. At the time, I was sharing a research office at INESC-ID with Thomas Durieux and Rui Maranhao Abreu. In one of our chats, I told them about the idea, and a few months later, our ICSE 2020 paper was ready and submitted!

Since then, SmartBugs has grown far beyond what we imagined:

• Used in CI pipelines and audits
• Adopted in teaching (including at TU Wien by Monika di Angelo and Gernot Salzer)
• Extended with many new tools and features
• Inspired another large-scale study on Ethereum bytecode (leading to SmartBugs 2.0 which is featured in Empirical Software Engineering 2024 paper).

What started as a research prototype became a tool that the community uses and builds upon. On a personal note, I’m very grateful for the many new friends I’ve made throughout this project.

I’m still invested in SmartBugs and have ideas to make it even more impactful.

👉 If you’re interested in collaborating, let’s talk! Also, check out the work we are doing at the Software Reliability Lab!

Thank you to my amazing co-authors and everyone who cited, used, or improved our work.