SIGMOD 2016 CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS
The annual ACM SIGMOD conference is a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. We invite the submission of original research contributions relating to all aspects of data management defined broadly, and particularly encourage submissions on topics of emerging interest in the research and development communities.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:
- Benchmarking and performance evaluation
- Crowd sourcing
- Data models, semantics, query languages
- Data provenance
- Data visualization
- Data warehousing, OLAP, SQL Analytics
- Database monitoring and tuning
- Database security, privacy, access control
- Database usability
- Databases for emerging hardware
- Distributed and parallel databases
- Graph data management, RDF, social networks
- Information extraction
- Information retrieval and text mining
- Knowledge discovery, clustering, data mining
- Query processing and optimization
- Schema matching, data integration, and data cleaning
- Scientific databases
- Semi-structured data
- Spatio-temporal databases
- Storage, indexing, and physical database design
- Streams, sensor networks, complex event processing
- Transaction processing
- Uncertain, probabilistic, and approximate databases
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All aspects of the submission and notification process will be handled electronically. Submissions must adhere to the paper formatting instructions. Research papers will be judged for quality and relevance through double-blind reviewing, where the identities of the authors are withheld from the reviewers. Thus, author names and affiliations must not appear in the papers, and bibliographic references must be adjusted to preserve author anonymity. Submissions should be uploaded at https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/SIGMOD2016/.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE (all on 4:59 p.m. PST)
Research papers: as in the previous two SIGMOD conferences, there are two submission deadlines as below. Each submission cycle involves two rounds of reviewing to allow for minor revisions. Papers rejected in the first cycle are not allowed to be re-submitted in the second cycle.
FIRST SUBMISSION DATES:
July 9, 2015 : Research paper abstracts due
July 16, 2015: Research paper submissions due
September 18, 2015 : Notification
October 19, 2015: Revised Submission
November 13, 2015 : Notification
February 9, 2016: Camera-ready due
SECOND SUBMISSION DATES:
November 12, 2015 : Research paper abstracts due
November 19, 2015: Research paper submissions due
January 29, 2016 : Notification
March 7, 2016: Revised Submission
April 4, 2016 : Notification
April 15, 2016: Camera-ready due
PROCEEDINGS AVAILABILITY
The proceedings will be publicly available from the ACM digital library 15 days before
the start of the conference. Therefore, the official publication date for papers will
be 11 June 2016. The proceedings will remain open for one year and will be accessible
from ACM DL using Author-izer links.
Note that the official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
During submission of a research paper, the submission site will request information about conflicts of interest of the paper's authors with program committee (PC) members. It is the full responsibility of all authors of a paper to identify all and only their potential conflict-of-interest PC members, according to the following definition:
A paper author has a conflict of interest with a PC member when and only
when one or more of the following conditions holds:
Papers with incorrect or incomplete conflict of interest information as of the submission closing time are subject to immediate rejection.
DUPLICATE SUBMISSIONS AND NOVELTY REQUIREMENTS
A research paper submitted to SIGMOD 2016 cannot be under review for any other publishing forum or presentation venue, including conferences, workshops, and journals, during the time it is being considered for SIGMOD. Furthermore, after you submit a research paper to SIGMOD, you must await the response from SIGMOD and only resubmit elsewhere if your paper is rejected--or withdrawn at your request--from SIGMOD. This restriction applies to identical papers as well as to papers with a substantial overlap in scientific content and results.
Every research paper submitted to SIGMOD 2016 must present substantial novel research not described in any prior publication. In this context, a prior publication is (a) a paper of five pages or more presented, or accepted for presentation, at a refereed conference or workshop with proceedings; or (b) an article published, or accepted for publication, in a refereed journal. If a SIGMOD 2016 submission has overlap with a prior publication, the submission must cite the prior publication, along with all other relevant published work, following the guidelines in the Anonymity Requirements for Double-Blind Reviewing section below.
Any violation of this policy will result in the immediate rejection of the submission, as well as in notification to the members of the SIGMOD Executive Committee, the members of the SIGMOD PC, and the editors or chairs of any other forums involved.
LENGTH, FILE TYPE, AND FORMATTING
Length: All submitted research papers must be formatted according to the instructions below. The main content of that paper must be no more than 12 pages in length, although we will allow up to an additional 4 pages for the bibliography and appendices describing additional material, as described below.
Appendix: In addition to the bibliography, papers may optionally include an appendix with additional material relevant to the paper. The total length of the additional appendix and bibliography must not exceed 4 pages. The paper should stand alone without the appendix, and reviewers should not be required to consult the appendix to understand the key ideas, algorithms, results, experiments, or conclusions of the paper. Instead, the appendix should be used for additional material, such as proofs or non-essential experimental results, that the authors wish to convey should the reviewers choose to read them. Reviewers will be instructed to judge the paper on the merits of the material in the main body of the paper (including the references) and will not be required to read or review the material in the appendix.
File type: Each research paper is to be submitted as a single PDF file, formatted for 8.5" x 11" paper and no more than 5 MB in file size. (Larger files will be rejected by the submission site.) Submitted papers must print without difficulty on a variety of printers, using Adobe Acrobat Reader. It is the responsibility of the authors to ensure that their submitted PDF file will print easily on simple default configurations.
Formatting: Research papers must follow the ACM Proceedings Format, using one of the templates provided at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for Word and LaTeX (version 2e). (For LaTeX, both Option 1 and Option 2 are acceptable.) The font size, margins, inter-column spacing, and line spacing in the templates must be kept unchanged.
Any submitted paper violating the length, file type, or formatting requirements will be rejected without review.
ANONYMITY REQUIREMENTS FOR DOUBLE-BLIND REVIEWING
Every research paper submitted to SIGMOD 2016 will undergo a "double-blind" reviewing process: the PC members and referees who review the paper will not know the identity of the authors. To ensure anonymity of authorship, authors must prepare their manuscript as follows:
- Authors' names and affiliations must not appear on the title page or elsewhere in the paper.
- Funding sources must not be acknowledged on the title page or elsewhere in the paper.
- Research group members, or other colleagues or collaborators, must not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper.
- The paper's file name must not identify the authors of the paper. It is strongly suggested that the submitted file be named with the assigned submission number. For example, if your assigned paper number is 352, then name your submission file 352.pdf.
- Source file naming must also be done with care, to avoid identifying the authors' name in the paper's associated metadata. For example, if your name is Jane Smith and you submit a PDF file generated from a .dvi file called Jane-Smith.dvi, your authorship could be inferred by looking into the PDF file.
You must also use care in referring to related past work, particularly your own, in the paper. For example, if you are Jane Smith, the following text gives away the authorship of the submitted paper:
In our previous work [1, 2], we presented two algorithms for ... In this paper, we build on that work by ...
Bibliography [1] Jane Smith, "A Simple Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD 1997, pp. 1 - 10. [2] Jane Smith, "A More Complicated Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD 1998, pp. 34 - 44.
The solution is to reference your past work in the third person (just as you would any other piece of work that is related to the submitted paper). This allows you to set the context for the submitted paper, while at the same time preserving anonymity:
In previous work [1, 2], algorithms were presented for ... In this paper, we build on that work by ...
Bibliography [1] Jane Smith, "A Simple Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD 1997, pp. 1 - 10. [2] Jane Smith, "A More Complicated Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD 1998, pp. 34 - 44.
Despite the anonymity requirements, you should still include all relevant work of your own in the references, using the above style; omitting them could potentially reveal your identity by negation. However, self-references should be limited to the essential ones, and extended versions of the submitted paper (e.g., technical reports or URLs for downloadable versions) must not be referenced.
Common sense and careful writing can go a long way toward preserving anonymity without diminishing the quality or impact of a paper. The goal is to preserve anonymity while still allowing the reader to fully grasp the context (related past work, including your own) of the submitted paper. In past years this goal has been achieved successfully by hundreds of papers.
It is the responsibility of authors to do their very best to preserve anonymity. Papers that do not follow the guidelines here, or otherwise potentially reveal the identity of the authors, are subject to immediate rejection.
REVIEWING PROCESS
Every research paper submitted to SIGMOD 2016 will undergo a "double-blind" reviewing process, as discussed above. Additional important aspects of the reviewing process are as follows:
- Revisions: Some papers will be invited to resubmit a
revised version of their paper. Authors will have approximately a
month to prepare their revision. The program committee will invite
revisions at their discretion. The revision process is intended to
be a constructive partnership between reviewers and authors. To this
end, reviewers will be instructed to request revisions only in
constructive scenarios with specific requests. In turn, authors
bear the responsibility of attempting to meet those requests within
the stated timeframe, or of withdrawing the paper from submission.
Common revision requests can include “justify a crucial assumption”,
“present a real(istic) scenario where the defined problem occurs”,
“clean up notation”, “tighten presentation”, “compare against some
relevant previous system”, “show experimental results with better
data, such as at larger scale or from a real system”. Revisions
will not be requested to address lack of technical depth or novelty
or where the revised paper will address a substantially different
problem from the original.
- Number of accepted papers and implications: The number of accepted research papers will not be capped. We will accept all papers meeting the high quality and innovation standards of SIGMOD, and all accepted papers will be incorporated into the conference program. To this end, SIGMOD 2016 will continue to include "Research Plenary Sessions," where every accepted research paper will be presented as a "research poster." The Research Plenary Sessions will be the main forum for presentation of all research papers, and an accepted paper will not necessarily be chosen for a "traditional" presentation slot during the conference. However, the presentation decisions will not be reflected in the conference proceedings, which are the persistent, archival record of the conference.
