Study Types
The SE community needs guidelines to establish common standards for designing and reporting empirical studies involving LLMs. However, such guidelines must be tailored to different study types that each pose unique challenges. Therefore, we created a taxonomy of study types to contextualize our recommendations. We use the term study type to refer to categories of LLM involvement in empirical research, rather than to research methodologies (e.g., experiments, case studies). A single empirical study may involve multiple such study types. Each study type section starts with a description, followed by examples from the SE research community and beyond. The advantages and challenges of using LLMs are discussed in a summary subsection at the end of this section, synthesizing cross-cutting themes across all study types.