Content Guidelines for Full Papers

Authors are invited to submit research papers presenting original, previously unpublished work. Paper submissions are invited as discussed in the calls for contributions.

Abstracts and full papers must be submitted electronically using the submission Web page.

Abstracts (up to 400 words) should submitted in the same manner as papers, but without uploading an actual paper (PDF file). The PDF file for the full paper can then be uploaded any time before the full paper submission deadline.

Please select a few keywords that reflect the contributions of your paper.

Please adhere to the guidelines listed below regarding novelty, format, anonymity, and language.

Novelty. A submission must represent new, original research.

Format. Submitted papers should be in the ACM Conference style (for LaTeX, use the “Option 2” style). This is also the style that will be required for final papers. Papers must not exceed 10 pages in 9 point font and must be submitted as PDF files. Papers exceeding the limits will be rejected without review.

Anonymity. SIGIR review is double-blind. Therefore, please anonymize your submission. This means that all submissions must contain no information identifying the author(s) or their organization(s): Do not put the author(s) names or affiliation(s) at the start of the paper, anonymize citations to and mentions of your own prior work in the paper, and do not include funding or other acknowledgments in papers submitted for review.

For example, if you are using your product (or other thing) that is well known in the domain and you think it will be easy for an expert to identify the author(s)/affiliation, we recommend that you use another name for your product (e.g., “MyProduct_ABC”, MyCompany _ABC”). If your paper is accepted, then you will replace the original name in the final version for the proceedings.

The anonymity is used to be fair between different authors. Being a young (and less known) author or a well-established researcher, you must have the same chance. The content of the paper is important, not the writer. Thus, papers not complying with the above anonymity requirements will be rejected without review.

Language. All submissions must be in English.

Submission deadlines

Guidelines for Experimental Evaluation

Experimental evaluations have a long tradition in IR, particularly in providing support for some theoretical model. So, a good SIGIR paper should generally contain some theory, accompanied by solid experimental evidence. Acceptable SIGIR papers can also result from a heuristic combination of methods with solid experimental evidence if there is sufficient novelty and analysis of results to provide insights. A paper that provides new theoretical results without experimental validation will rarely be acceptable to SIGIR.

The use of publicly available test collections is preferred. However, depending on the test collections used, the following points should be considered:

  1. If publicly available test collections are used, experimental results should include a comparison to the best known baselines for these collections. If no such comparison is made, the choice of a different baseline should be justified. If you have a question about appropriate baselines, contact chairs@sigir2012.confmaster.net.
  2. If you create your own test collection, you are encouraged to make this collection available to the research community. SIGIR strongly encourages the creation of new test collections, both for 'classic' retrieval tasks as well as for new types of tasks.
  3. The use of proprietary test collections is becoming increasingly common and may be unavoidable in some cases. However, experimental results from such collections are more difficult to reproduce. It is important to publish as much detail as possible about the collection (including the queries) and to ensure that the algorithms used can be reproduced.
Finally, it is very important that previous related work is appropriately cited. This is a common problem identified by reviewers.

Prior Publication

Papers containing substantially similar material may not be submitted to other venues concurrently with SIGIR. If a duplicate submission is identified during the review process, it will be rejected without review, and authors will not be permitted to submit papers to the SIGIR conference in the following year.

The Program Committee will consider the following types of papers to be not published: