sigir-related-work

SIGIR Related Work

At SIGIR, related work is a credibility exam graded by reviewers who may have

written the papers you cite. IR is an old field with a living canon: a related-work

section that starts retrieval history at BERT signals a visitor from an adjacent

community, which primes every other judgment. This skill builds positioning that

demonstrates lineage fluency and states the delta mechanically.

The lineage obligation

An IR paper is expected to know which research line it extends and to cite the

line's origin plus its current SIGIR-era frontier. The canonical lines and their

anchors (all venue-verified — see ../../resources/exemplars/library.md):

| Line | Origin anchor | What your delta sentence must contrast |

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

| Probabilistic/lexical ranking | Robertson-era BM25 work; Ponte & Croft's language-modeling approach (SIGIR 1998) | Which term-weighting/estimation assumption you change |

| LM smoothing & estimation | Zhai & Lafferty (SIGIR 2001) | Estimation method, prior, or evidence source |

| Graded evaluation | Järvelin & Kekäläinen (SIGIR 2000; nDCG lineage) | Which validity gap your metric/protocol closes |

| Neural re-ranking / late interaction | ColBERT (SIGIR 2020) | Interaction granularity, storage, or supervision |

| Graph collaborative filtering | NGCF (SIGIR 2019), LightGCN (SIGIR 2020) | Propagation structure or training signal |

You do not cite all lines — you identify yours and prove you know both ends of it.

Venue misattribution: the IR-specific trap

Retrieval's most-cited recent papers are scattered across NLP and ML venues, and

misattributing them is a reviewer's one-glance credibility test:

• DPR (dense passage retrieval): EMNLP 2020, not SIGIR.
• ANCE: ICLR 2021, not SIGIR.
• Neural Collaborative Filtering: WWW 2017, not SIGIR (its graph successors

NGCF/LightGCN are SIGIR).

• RankNet: ICML 2005. BERT itself: NAACL 2019.
• BM25's standard citations are TREC/SIGIR-era Robertson et al. papers, not "the

Anserini paper"; cite the toolkit separately when you mean the implementation.

• Järvelin & Kekäläinen's "Cumulated gain-based evaluation" is TOIS 2002 — the

SIGIR 2000 paper is the earlier "highly relevant documents" one; the pair is the

classic conference-then-journal split, and conflating them is common and noticed.

# Bibliography audit: flag entries whose venue field is suspiciously vague
grep -nE "booktitle.*(arXiv|CoRR|preprint)" refs.bib      # published since?
grep -nE "@misc|howpublished" refs.bib                     # citing repos as papers?
grep -in "sigir" refs.bib | wc -l                          # lineage presence check

The delta sentence, mechanized

For each of the 3-5 nearest neighbors (not the 30 nearest keywords), write one

sentence with three fixed slots: what it does (mechanism, not adjective), *what we

do differently (mechanism again), what that buys* (measured, or honestly "which we

test in §5"). Neighbors are papers a reviewer would confuse with yours — the correct

list usually includes at least one paper from the last two SIGIR volumes, one from a

sibling venue (ECIR/CIKM/WSDM/WWW/RecSys), and one journal or TREC-track antecedent

that pre-dates the neural era. Missing that third slot is how "novel" claims collide

with 2009.

Concurrent and arXiv-era work

IR moves at preprint speed while SIGIR reviews at conference speed:

• Sweep arXiv (cs.IR) and the latest SIGIR/ECIR/CIKM accepted-paper lists in the

final week before submission; add a "concurrent work" note for anything published

after your experiments froze. Reviewers respect the note and punish the silence.

• Cite preprints as preprints; when a preprint you rely on has since been published,

cite the published version — mixed-provenance bibliographies age badly in the

version of record.

• Anonymity interaction: discussing your own preprint must stay third-person and

must not make the identification trivial (see sigir-submission).

Positioning failures that cost accepts

• The adjacent-community rewrite: framing a retrieval problem entirely in LLM/

agent vocabulary with no IR literature — reviewers read it as "wrong venue."

• The strawman baseline lineage: citing only pre-neural or untuned versions of

the line you claim to beat.

• The enumeration: three paragraphs of "X did A. Y did B." with no contrast

work — spends budget without answering "so what is new?"

• The self-citation cluster: heavy self-lineage both risks anonymity and reads

as insularity; balance against external anchors.

• TREC blindness: proposing an evaluation methodology or task without checking

whether a TREC/NTCIR/CLEF track already operationalized it.

The reviewer-eye test

Before freezing the section, simulate the three reads it will get:

• The 30-second AC skim: do the paragraph topic sentences alone convey "line

identified, frontier known, delta stated"? If the deltas hide mid-paragraph,

surface them.

• The competitor's read: the author of your nearest neighbor may be R2. Is their

paper described accurately enough that they nod before you pivot to the

difference? Misdescribing a rival's mechanism converts a fixable delta dispute

into hostile review.

• The veteran's read: is there any sentence a 20-year IR researcher would mark

"we knew this in the 2000s"? Pre-neural antecedents cited by you defuse what

they discover for you.

Placement under the 9-page budget

Related work earns ~0.75 page in a full paper. Two structures work: after the intro

(when positioning is the motivation) or before the conclusion (when the method

needs no prior-work vocabulary). In short papers, related work compresses into the

introduction as positioning sentences with dense citations — a standalone section is

usually a page-budget error.

Output format

[Line identified] <which research line, origin + frontier cited y/n>
[Neighbor set] <3-5 papers with mechanism-contrast sentences present y/n>
[Misattribution scan] venues checked against exemplar library: violations <list>
[Era coverage] pre-neural antecedent / recent SIGIR volume / sibling venue: present each
[Concurrent-work note] needed y/n, drafted y/n
[Budget] <fraction of page used> and placement choice