I came across this post on hackernews. Just like the title says, it lists many interesting papers from 1996 to 2018. I said in my first ever post that I am very into refactoring and clean coding these days so from this list one particular paper caught my eye: Understanding Misunderstandings in Source Code written by Dan Gopstein, Jake Iannacone, Yu Yan, Lois DeLong, Yanyan Zhuang, Martin K.-C. Yeh, Justin Cappos.

They talk about something they call “atoms of confusion” that are the smallest sections in source code that have the potential to confuse developers. They have a scientific way of finding these and so help developers and/or companies improve source code and cut development costs coming from these confusions. Here is the paper: https://atomsofconfusion.com/papers/understanding-misunderstandings-fse-2017.pdf