icde-topic-selection

ICDE Topic Selection

Use this before writing. ICDE is strongest for data engineering — the design, building,

management, and evaluation of data-intensive systems — where the contribution is a

reconstructable data-management primitive with a systems-grade evaluation.

The data-management-primitive test

Ask what primitive the paper advances: an access method, a query operator, an

execution or storage mechanism, a transaction or concurrency protocol, a **data

integration/cleaning/provenance technique, or a scalable analytics engine**. If no

primitive exists — if the database is merely a container for a result that lives elsewhere —

the ICDE framing does not exist either.

Routing from ICDE's seat: the three-venue triangle

The scopes of ICDE, SIGMOD, and VLDB overlap almost entirely, so routing is usually about

calendar geometry and house culture, not topic. Deciding from ICDE's seat:

| If the deciding factor is... | Lean toward | Because |

|---|---|---|

| You want two fixed shots a year and IEEE-Xplore proceedings | ICDE | Two rounds per edition (≈June + November), single-blind, IEEE format |

| You want quarterly journal-style rounds with a formal revision and a rejection embargo | SIGMOD / PACMMOD | Four rounds on the 17th, double-anonymous, 12-month embargo |

| You want to pick any month and submit on a rolling calendar | VLDB / PVLDB | Twelve monthly deadlines on the 1st, single-blind, revise verdict |

| The work is a shipped production system with deployment evidence | ICDE industry track (or SIGMOD industrial) | Non-academic co-author, production-scale story |

| The work needs journal-length treatment | IEEE TKDE or The VLDB Journal | Full-length exposition; ICDE best papers are invited to extend into TKDE anyway |

| The work is European-database-community facing | EDBT | Overlapping scope, different community and calendar |

Fit signal table

| Signal in the project | ICDE reading |

|---|---|

| A new index, operator, or storage layout with a systems evaluation | Core fit — the house genre |

| A concurrency/transaction protocol exploiting new hardware | Core fit (cf. the Bw-Tree exemplar) |

| A platform primitive an ecosystem can build on | Core fit (cf. the SpatialHadoop exemplar) |

| A production cloud-database architecture with deployment lessons | Industry and applications track |

| An ML model that happens to run on data | Route to an ML venue unless the DB primitive is the contribution |

| A pure theory result with no system or workload | Route to a theory or journal venue |

Sharpening moves before committing

• Name the primitive in one sentence. "We make ordering a read-time cost so ingestion is

write-bandwidth-bound" is a primitive; "we improve time-series databases" is a topic.

• Check the round you can actually hit. Because a Round 1 reject skips you to the next

edition, do not aim a half-built system at Round 1 just because it is sooner.

• Decide research vs. industry honestly. If the evidence is production scale and the

novelty is engineering-at-scale rather than a new mechanism, the industry track fits better

and reviews you on the right axis.

• Topic emphasis and track boundaries drift between editions; scan the current call's topic

list before final routing.

Output format

[Fit] strong ICDE / possible ICDE / better elsewhere
[Primitive] <one-sentence data-management primitive, or "none">
[Best venue] ICDE-research / ICDE-industry / SIGMOD / PVLDB / TKDE / EDBT / other
[Round target] Round 1 or Round 2 of which edition, if ICDE
[Top rejection risk] <novelty / evaluation / scope / wrong-track>
[Next action] <build, measure, reframe, or venue switch>