I’ve read a lot of software engineering research[1], because I’m interested in being as productive as possible, but SE research reminds me of a lot of empirical economics from the 70s. People were (and still are) trying to figure out what can be done for developing countries. Back then, researchers more much more likely to try to figure out what methods were the absolute best, period. Now, people are much more likely to acknowledge that there’s path dependence, and that something that works in one context may be completely useless in another context.

It’s rare to see serious empirical work in SE that’s up the same standards as empirical work in modern economics (either an RCT, or a good pseudo-experiment from a clever instrumental variable), and when you do, there’s little to no discussion of how generalizable the work is. There’s often a paragraph about how the study may not generalize, which seems to be enough to satisfy peer reviewers, but isn’t nearly enough to figure out if the methodology under test has any applicability whatsoever to your setting.

[1] if you're curious, and want to look up what's in vougue, the premier SE conferences are ICSE and FSE