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SIGMOD 2021 CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS

Xi'an, Shaanxi, China, June 20-25, 2021, https://2021.sigmod.org

The annual ACM SIGMOD conference is a leading international forum for data management researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences.

There are three research tracks in SIGMOD 2021:

HIGHLIGHTS

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

SIGMOD welcomes submissions on inter-disciplinary work, as long as there are clear contributions to management of data.

IMPORTANT DATES

Research papers: as in recent SIGMOD conferences, there are two submission cycles. Each submission cycle involves two rounds of reviewing to allow for revisions. Papers rejected in the first cycle are not allowed to be re-submitted in the second cycle. All notification dates are approximate.

RESEARCH PAPER FIRST SUBMISSION CYCLE (All Deadlines are 5:00pm Pacific Time)
July 7, 2020 : Paper submission
August 11-14, 2020: Author feedback phase
September 14, 2020: Notification of accept/revise/reject
November 25, 2020: Revised paper submission
January 20, 2021: Notification of accept/reject for revised submission
March 7, 2021: Camera-ready deadline

RESEARCH PAPER SECOND SUBMISSION CYCLE (All Deadlines are 5:00pm Pacific Time)
September 22, 2020: Paper submission
November 6-12, 2020: Author feedback phase (CMT will open on November 5, 11:59 PT, and close at November 12, 11:59 PT)
November 30, 2020: Notification of accept/revise/reject
February 17, 2021: Revised paper submission
March 10, 2021: Notification of accept/reject for revised submission
March 31, 2021: Camera-ready deadline

PRESENTATION AND DISSEMINATION

Accepted papers will not necessarily be chosen for a ''traditional'' presentation slot during the conference: the PC may decide to select only a few papers for presentation. However, all accepted papers will be treated equally in the conference proceedings, which are the persistent, archival record of the conference.

PROCEEDINGS AVAILABILITY

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

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. 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://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/SIGMOD2021

DUPLICATE SUBMISSIONS AND NOVELTY REQUIREMENT

A research paper submitted to SIGMOD 2021 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 re-submit elsewhere if your paper is rejected - or withdrawn at your request - from SIGMOD. This restriction applies not only to identical papers but also to papers with a substantial overlap in scientific content and results.

Every research paper submitted to SIGMOD 2021 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 2021 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

The ACM template changed in 2017. Make sure you are using the latest version.

Length: All submitted research papers must be formatted according to the instructions below. The main content of the paper must be no more than 12 pages in length for Data Management papers, 8 pages for Data Science and Engineering papers, and 4 pages for Applications papers, although we will allow an unlimited number of pages for the bibliography. No appendix will be allowed.

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 10 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 either the sample-sigconf.tex or Interim layout.docx template provided at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for LaTeX (version 2e) or Word, respectively. The 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 2021 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 at least do the following:

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 work that is related to your submitted paper). This allows you to set the context for your submission, 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 thousands 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.

AVAILABILITY

We expect all papers to make their code, data, scripts, and notebooks available if this is possible. Although it is not mandatory for acceptance, providing this extra material can help reviewers evaluate your work more thoroughly.

Please include a link with your materials in the text box provided in the submission form at the time of submission. The link and materials should preserve anonymity. For example this may be an anonymous GitHub repository. You may want to make sure that the link you provide is not indexed by search engines. On GitHub, you can do so by adding the following to the page head: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">.

We recognize that at the time of submission authors focus on fine-tuning the paper, and so we expect this link to be live within two weeks from submission. Reviewers that may need to look at the materials will not do so earlier than that. Note, that we do not expect a fully polished submission in terms of automatically reproducing results, but rather a reasonably clean version of the state of the code when submitting the paper. Please, do not use a shortened link which traces who accesses it.

In the event that you are not able to submit your code, data, scripts, and notebooks please explain in the text box provided in the submission form why this is the case.

INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY IN WRITING

We value Diversity and Inclusion in our community and professions. Both are important in our writing as well. Be mindful in your writing of not using language or examples that further the marginalization, stereotyping, or erasure of any group of people, especially historically marginalized and/or under-represented groups (URGs) in computing. Also be vigilant and guard against unintentionally exclusionary examples. Reviewers will be empowered to monitor and demand changes if such issues arise. Going further, also consider actively raising the representation of URGs in your writing. Diversity of representation in writing is a simple but visible avenue to celebrate and ultimately help improve our community’s diversity. 

Please visit this page for many examples of both exclusionary writing to avoid and inclusive writing that celebrates diversity to consider adopting: http://2021.sigmod.org/calls_papers_inclusion_and_diversity.shtml

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.

REVIEWING PROCESS

Number of reviews: All papers will receive at least three reviews. Papers for which the three reviews do not converge to an acceptance may receive additional reviews.

Rebuttals: Before the discussion phase starts between reviewers and decisions are made, authors will have a few days to read the reviews and submit an optional short rebuttal. The sole purpose of the rebuttal is to clarify misunderstandings and factual errors through pointers to specific text in the submitted paper. As an example, a reviewer may have overlooked a part of the discussion in the paper and state that the paper fails to compare with a certain method; an example rebuttal will be of the form "see Section 2.4, paragraph 3". If no factual errors exist in the reviews, a rebuttal is not needed.

Revisions: Some papers will be invited to submit a revised version of their paper. Authors will have two and a half months 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 time frame, 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.