The Blog of Bob Rubbens
In the field of computer science, it’s common practice to implement the techniques you are researching. This has several potential benefits: you can do case studies using your implementation, and the practical implementation experience shows you where your technique is still lacking.
When the implementations researchers make work well enough, they are sometimes even included with the papers they write. For example, for our paper “The VerCors Verifier: A Progress Report” [1], we included a copy of the current version of the VerCors program verifier, as well as documentation and scripts to run the case studies we have done in the past few years. When software, scripts, or datasets are included with papers this way, we call the included data an “artifact”.
Strangely enough, the correct spelling of “artifact” seems to be an open problem. Frequently the spelling “artefact” is also used, sometimes even in the same document! Consider the TACAS2025 homepage. At the time of writing, it mostly uses “artifact” everywhere, except for the “Artifact Submission” section, where it uses both “artifact” and “artefact”. The iFM 2024 artifacts page exclusively uses “artifact”, while the COORDINATION 2025 conference website uses “artefact” exclusively. I’ve also seen paper reviews that use both spellings. What’s going on? And more importantly, which one should I use?
Google Trends paints a pretty unanimous picture about usage of the words globally:
Clearly, “artifact” takes the lead here. It also gives a plausible explanation for “artefact” appearing in the wild: it is actually a french word. Unfortunately, this information is not enough for me to decide which one I should use. After all, this is just a tally count.
Let’s have a look at what my former employer, the University of Twente, has to say about this in its style guide:
Consult the online Oxford Learner’s Dictionary (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/) to check spelling, grammar and punctuation not covered by this guide.
Ah, we can just look it up in a specific dictionary! This should be done quickly.
Ugh, they’re both in the dictionary???
Fun and games aside, this more or less wraps it up for me. “Artifact” is definitely used more often, and my former employer allows using it, if only by virtue of allowing either spelling. Therefore, it makes sense for me personally to use “artifact” over “artefact”.
There you have it. Until someone can point out flaws in these two reasons, using “artifact” makes sense to me. Until I write something in French, at least!