SIGMOD 2020 CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS
Portland, Oregon, USA, June 14-19, 2020, https://sigmod2020.org

The annual ACM SIGMOD conference is a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. We invite the submission of original research contributions relating to all aspects of data management defined broadly, and particularly encourage submissions on topics of emerging interest in the research and development communities.

HIGHLIGHTS
Abstract submission deadline (first round): Tuesday July 9, 2019
Paper submission deadline (first round): Tuesday July 16, 2019
Submission website: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/SIGMOD2020 (will open for submission starting June 9, 2019)
Submissions must use the latest ACM format, and must be at most 14 pages plus an unlimited number of pages for citations. No appendix is allowed, and the font size must be 10 pts.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

Benchmarking and performance evaluation
Crowd sourcing
Data models, semantics, query languages
Data provenance
Data visualization
Data warehousing, OLAP, SQL Analytics
Database monitoring and tuning
Database security, privacy, access control
Database usability
Databases for emerging hardware
Distributed and parallel databases
Graph data management, RDF, social networks
Information extraction
Information retrieval and text mining
Knowledge discovery, clustering, data mining
Query processing and optimization
Schema matching, data integration, and data cleaning
Scientific databases
Semi-structured data
Spatio-temporal databases
Storage, indexing, and physical database design
Streams, sensor networks, complex event processing
Transaction processing
Uncertain, probabilistic, and approximate databases
Machine learning for data management and vice versa
SIGMOD welcomes submissions on inter-disciplinary work, as long as there are clear contributions to management of data.

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/SIGMOD2020 (which will be open for submission starting June 9, 2019).

IMPORTANT DATES
Research papers: as in the previous two SIGMOD conferences, there are two submission cycles. Each submission cycle involves two rounds of reviewing to allow for minor 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 9, 2019 : Abstract submission
July 16, 2019: Paper submission
September 4-5, 2019: Author responses
October 3, 2019: Notification of accept/revise/reject
November 4, 2019: Revised Submission
November 25, 2019: Notification of revision decision
The dates for research papers' second submission cycle will be announced later.

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.
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 REQUIREMENT
A research paper submitted to SIGMOD 2020 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 2020 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 2020 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 14 pages in length, 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 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 either the sample-sigconf.tex or ACM_SigConf.docx template provided at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for LaTeX (version 2e) or Word, respectively. Note that the font size has to be changed to 10 pts . 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 2018 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:

Authors' names and affiliations must not appear on the title page or elsewhere in the paper.
Funding sources must not be acknowledged anywhere 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.
Source file naming must also be done with care, to avoid identifying the authors’ names 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 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.

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 final decisions are made, authors will have 48 hours 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 less than a month 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.

PRESENTATION AND DISSEMINATION
The main forum for presentation at SIGMOD 2020 will continue to be the ''Research Plenary Sessions'', where every accepted research paper will be presented as a ''research poster''. 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.