Paper Submission Guidelines SIGMOD 2013
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:
- The PC member is a co-author of the paper.
- The PC member has been a co-worker in the same company or university within the past two years.
- The PC member has been a collaborator within the past two years.
- The PC member is or was the author's primary thesis advisor, no matter how long ago.
- The author is or was the PC member's primary thesis advisor, no matter how long ago.
- The PC member is a relative or close personal friend of the author.
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 2013 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paper to SIGMOD, you must await the response from SIGMOD and only resubmit elsewhere if your paper is rejected--or withdrawn at your request--from SIGMOD.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 2013 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 2013 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, and must be no more than 12 pages in length. This page limit includes all parts of the paper: title, abstract, body, bibliography, and appendices.
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 http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html 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 2013 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.
