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Developers build programs based on software libraries to reduce coding effort. If a program inappropriately sets an API parameter, the program may exhibit unexpected runtime behaviors. To help developers correctly use library APIs, researchers built tools to mine API parameter rules. However, it is still unknown (1) what types of parameter rules there are, and (2) how these rules distribute inside documents and source files. In this paper, we conducted an empirical study to investigate the above-mentioned questions. To analyze as many parameter rules as possible, we took a hybrid approach that combines automatic localization of constrained parameters with manual inspection. Our automatic approach---PaRu---locates parameters that have constraints either documented in Javadoc (i.e., document rules) or implied by source code (i.e., code rules). Our manual inspection (1) identifies and categorizes rules for the …