recsys-related-work

RecSys Related Work

Use this to audit novelty and eligibility. Reopen the current Call for Contributions for

dual-submission, anonymity, and prior-publication rules before advising authors.

Positioning checks

• Separate the recommendation contribution from generic ML improvement: a new ranking

objective, user/item modeling idea, evaluation protocol, off-policy estimator, or empirical

insight about deployed behavior.

• Cover the recommendation subfields your claim touches: collaborative filtering, sequential/

session models, off-policy/counterfactual evaluation, fairness/diversity/exposure, and — for any

empirical claim — the reproducibility-critique line.

• Treat ACM Digital Library, journal, and formal conference proceedings as archival unless current

rules say otherwise.

• Cite arXiv and prior-version work so double-blind review survives; do not point reviewers to

identity-revealing pages.

• Explain overlap with any concurrent or prior version, and do not submit duplicate archival work.

Neighbor-venue coverage table

RecSys is a single-domain venue, but its neighbors publish recommendation-relevant work. A

reviewer checks whether you cite the right neighbor, not just RecSys itself.

| Neighbor venue | What it contributes to your related work | Reviewer check |

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

| SIGIR | Ranking models, IR evaluation, neural retrieval | Did you distinguish recommendation from ad-hoc retrieval framing? |

| KDD | Large-scale mining, the sampled-metrics critique | Is the scalability or evaluation-methodology neighbor acknowledged? |

| WSDM / TheWebConf | Web-scale recommendation, graph and CF methods | Is the nearest web-recommendation method compared? |

| UAI | Foundational ranking (e.g., BPR) and probabilistic modeling | Are canonical recommendation methods cited to their true venue, not RecSys? |

| Reproducibility line | "Are we really making much progress?" and follow-ups | Does your evaluation answer the tuned-baseline critique head on? |

A bibliography that cites only RecSys papers tells a reviewer you may have missed the method that

already solved this at a neighbor venue — a recognizable reject pattern that benchmark strength

does not repair.

Positioning vignette

Imagine the paper proposes an exposure-corrected session ranker. Its nearest neighbors: a SIGIR

neural ranker with no exposure correction, a KDD paper on sampled-metric bias, and a prior RecSys

counterfactual-embedding paper. The novelty sentence should name all three contrasts — exposure

handling where the SIGIR line ignored it, full-ranking evaluation answering the KDD critique, and

a session-level objective where the prior RecSys work was static.

Concurrent-work judgment calls

• Independently concurrent arXiv work: cite neutrally, state the technical difference, avoid

priority claims reviewers cannot verify.

• Your own prior version: verify its archival status against the current CFP and phrase the

citation so double-blind review survives.

• When unsure whether a venue is archival, declare the overlap on the submission form rather than

gambling on a chair's interpretation.

Output format

[Eligibility] clear / needs declaration / risky
[Closest subfields] <CF / sequential / off-policy / fairness / reproducibility>
[Nearest 3 works] <work -> distinction (with true venue)>
[Archival-overlap risk] <none / issues>
[Novelty sentence] <RecSys-ready recommendation contribution contrast>