Increased popularity of global software engineering (GSE) has resulted in quite a number of research and industrial studies. As the area matures, an increased focus on empirically supported results leads to a greater potential impact on future research and industrial practice. However, since GSE scenarios are diverse, what works in one context might not directly apply in another. Thus it is necessary to understand, how GSE-related empirical findings should be reported to be useful for practitioners and researchers. Furthermore, it‘s important to summarize progress and get the big picture of published research to identify gaps and commonalities. In this paper we analyze differentiating factors of GSE scenarios and offer a classification scheme for describing the context of a GSE study. In addition, we report initial results of a systematic review on GSE-related empirical literature using papers from ICGSE 2006 and 2007, at the same time illustrating and evaluating the proposed scheme.