SIGIR 2012 Mentoring Program

The ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR) offers a mentoring program to assist authors in preparing papers for submission to the ACM SIGIR conference. The mentoring program is intended for prospective authors who are planning to submit a paper to SIGIR 2012. The mentoring program is primarily intended for students and other researchers who are new to the field of information retrieval, but anyone who wishes to work with a mentor in preparation of their SIGIR submission (for whom suitable mentoring is not available locally) is invited to apply. A mentor can assist you in familiarizing yourself with the standards and submissions procedures of SIGIR. Your mentor can help you shape your proposed submission for the SIGIR audience (and SIGIR reviewers) through one-to-one advising, usually via e-mail. Mentors are volunteers who are experienced researchers in information retrieval and are familiar with successful submissions.

Requests

To request a mentor, please send an email to the Mentoring Chair, Douglas W. Oard (oard@umd.edu). Requests can be sent any time between October 15, 2011 and November 15, 2011. No requests will be accepted after November 15. Please include:

• Your name and affiliation (for academia, this would include the name of your department and university; for industry or government this would include your company or agency and your job title), and the name(s) and affiliation(s) of any planned co-authors.
• The title and abstract for your planned paper, included as a part of your email message (not as an attachment). You must have completed a draft paper at the time you apply for mentoring, but do not send your draft paper with your application — you should send it to your mentor once you have been notified who they are.
• Any specific questions or areas on which you would like help.

Requests for mentoring on topics that are clearly outside the scope of the ACM SIGIR conference, or requests from institutions where suitable mentoring is available locally, will not be accepted.

Mentors are primarily available for full papers, but they could also potentially assist you with preparation of other types of SIGIR 2012 submissions. Reasonable expectations for a mentor include giving advice as to the most appropriate forum for your work, suggesting improvements to your submission, and referring you to relevant research of which you might not have been aware. Mentors can provide advice on language issues of your paper, but cannot function as technical editors for your submission. Typically, a mentor might spend 3-7 hours on a submission. The fact that a paper was mentored is not considered during the paper selection process. In particular, reviewers will not be informed of whether a paper has been mentored.

Key Dates

The deadline for mentoring requests is November 15, 2011.

Contact

Send email to the Mentoring Chair: oard@umd.edu