Detailed Editorial Policy of the Record.
General policy SIGMOD Record publishes content that provides substantial value to the global database community and that is not appropriate for the community’s conferences and regular journals. We list below the main categories of welcomed contributions, and our policy for processing them.
Announcements The Record is the newsletter of the ACM’s SIGMOD chapter, and as such, one of its main missions is to disseminate interesting information to the community. Announcements of interest for the SIGMOD Record include calls for papers and calls for participation to workshops and conferences (especially, but not limited to the ACM or SIGMOD-related), book announcements, announcements of new initiatives, contests or competitions within or related to the international database research community, etc.
Workshop Workshop reports: Organizers of workshops on topics of interest to the database community at large may want to inform the community on new trends and new research opportunities. We encourage workshop reports to be relatively concise (4 pages is an upper limit, whereas 2 pages is typically sufficient). Potential authors of workshop reports are strongly encouraged to perform a synthesis over the individual workshop contributions, possibly listing ideas not included, or not obvious, in any of the workshop contributions considered in isolation. A workshop report that is too close to a table of contents is not more informative than the workshop’s Web page, and therefore will not be accepted.
Research centers The goal of this column is to advertise academic and industrial research groups working on data and information management issues. An ideal article for this column depicts the anatomy of a group (or a few closely-tied groups), including a brief discussion of the group’s history, its primary investigators, and recent activities along with collaborators and sources of funding. While most articles are invited by the research-center editor, direct submissions are also solicited and encouraged.
Database Principles and Distinguished Profiles in Databases These columns are under the care of their respective editors, and contributions appear here only by invitation from the editor.
Surveys State-of-the-art surveys have a long successful tradition in the SIGMOD Record. We welcome short surveys (of up to 12 pages) on topics of interest for the database community. The size constraint should not, however, lead to incomplete or partial snapshots of the state of the art in a given area. Instead, we encourage a sharp and focused writing style, which may sacrifice detail or extensive examples for breadth and comprehensiveness.
Systems and prototypes The SIGMOD Record welcomes short papers (up to 6 pages) describing innovative systems and prototypes. Such papers may (but do not need to) be developed versions of papers describing system demonstrations in a conference. However, demo papers are not acceptable as such. We encourage authors to omit details on GUIs (unless user interaction is the main topic of the system), demonstration scenarios and such, and instead to provide more insight into how the system is built, what its internal modules are, and why it has been done this way.
Regular articles The SIGMOD Record welcomes short research articles (of up to 6 pages), subject to the usual novelty and technical-soundness requirements of mainstream conferences and workshops. By its nature, the SIGMOD Record cannot and will not, however, serve as an alternative for regular publication venues such as conferences, journals, or workshops. Regular articles submitted to the SIGMOD Record should fit broadly in one of these three categories:
- Vision papers, outlining new ideas or lines of research, not necessarily well-explored at the time of the writing, if they are deemed original, compelling, and of interest to the community at large;
- Regular papers, structured and organized the way conference and workshop papers are, but whose natural length (when all the necessary ingredients of the work have been well presented) is of at most 6 pages. This page limit is (much) shorter than that for regular conference papers, and is set on purpose to emphasize the different type of contributions that we expect in the SIGMOD Record;
- Project reports, describing a (typically large) R&D project carried on within one or several institutions, over a period of one to a few years. Such reports are welcome, provided that they describe innovative work and are strictly more informative than “the sum of all the project’s parts.”
Other contributions As the (database) world evolves, we expect to host other categories of content, following suggestions and interesting ideas from the community. Please contact Rada Chirkova (chirkova@csc.ncsu.edu) if you have a proposal that does not fit any of the above.
Duplicate submissions Workshop reports, surveys, system and prototype papers, and regular papers should not be published, or under consideration in any other formal publication venue during the time period when they are under consideration for the SIGMOD record. A significant overlap (more than 25% of the SIGMOD Record submission and 1 common author) with such a previous or concurrent submission is not allowed either. Violation of the duplicate submission policy will typically result in outright rejecting the SIGMOD Record submission. Prospective authors are encouraged to signal any previous or concurrent publication closely related to the SIGMOD Record submission, in the Cover Letter form of the Web based submission tool (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sigmodrecord/), and explain there why the submission does not violate the duplicate-submission policy.
How to submit Submissions should be made electronically via https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sigmodrecord. Authors must ensure that their submission is properly formatted according to the guidelines (https://sigmodrecord.org/authors/).
Processing submissions Submissions to the SIGMOD Record are processed as follows.
- Announcements are processed by one editor, who accepts or rejects them, and may request modifications before accepting them.
- Workshop reports are processed by the reports editor, who may ask for modifications to be made in revised versions.
- Surveys, and system and prototype papers, are processed by the respective editor, who may solicit the opinions of external reviewers. The survey editor may then recommend acceptance with or without revision, or rejection.
- Regular articles are assigned by the editor-in-chief to an associate editor, who may solicit the opinion of external reviewers, recommend acceptance with or without revision, or rejection.
The SIGMOD Record editorial board can be found here: sigmodrecord.org/editors/.
Last update: January 14, 2020
Please send comments or suggestions to Rada Chirkova.