brycewang-stanford CIKM Related Work
Related work at CIKM is a three-front obligation. A submission claiming the IR-mining-KM boundary must show command of each literature it borrows from, plus the smaller literature that lives on the boundary — much of which is CIKM's own back catalog. A section citing only one lane tells two-thirds of the reviewer pool that their field's relevant results may be unknown to the authors.
Three-front coverage plan
| Front | Lineage to command | What its reviewer checks |
|---|---|---|
| Retrieval | Ranking models, neural matching (DRMM-line), evaluation practice | Is the nearest ranking method compared or distinguished? |
| Mining | Representation learning (GraRep-line), graph/sequence models, scale methods | Is the mechanism's delta over the nearest mining method stated? |
| KM / databases | Entity linking (TAGME-line), integration, KG construction and quality | Is the data-management cost and lineage acknowledged? |
The verified exemplars in ../../resources/exemplars/library.md mark where these
lineages pass through CIKM itself; citing the venue's own milestones — DSSM for
click-supervised semantic matching, RippleNet/BERT4Rec for KG- and
transformer-based recommendation — signals to the panel that the authors know whose
house they are submitting to.
The boundary-work paragraph
After the three lane surveys, CIKM related-work sections need one paragraph the single-lane venues do not: the works that already tried to combine the same lanes. Structure it as three sentences — who combined what ("X fused KG signals into ranking..."), what they could not do ("...but only for static graphs at million-triple scale"), what this paper changes at the seam ("we make the fusion incremental, which is what deployment requires"). Reviewers use exactly this paragraph to locate the contribution; write it so it can be quoted in a meta-review.
Misattribution guard
CIKM sits so close to its siblings that venue misattribution is a live review risk — and a credibility hit when a reviewer authored the misplaced paper. Checked traps (dblp-verified, 2026-07-08):
- DeepWalk, node2vec, metapath2vec → KDD, not CIKM; CIKM's graph-embedding milestone is GraRep (CIKM 2015).
- SASRec → ICDM 2018; the transformer-recommender at CIKM is BERT4Rec (CIKM 2019).
- NGCF and LightGCN → SIGIR (2019/2020); CIKM's KG-recommendation landmark is RippleNet (CIKM 2018).
- Conv-KNRM → WSDM 2018, while DRMM → CIKM 2016; the neural-IR lineage hops venues paper by paper.
- TransE → NeurIPS 2013 — KG-embedding origins are not CIKM even though KG applications are core CIKM territory.
Rule: before writing "(CIKM 20xx)", confirm on dblp's conf/cikm index; before
writing "prior CIKM work has not...", search the last three CIKM proceedings in the
ACM DL — with many hundreds of papers per recent edition, the prior work usually
exists.
Recency expectations by front
The three fronts age at different speeds, and reviewers calibrate accordingly. A workable recency floor when drafting:
| Front | Staleness signal reviewers flag | Floor |
|---|---|---|
| Neural retrieval / RAG-adjacent | No baseline or citation from the last ~18 months | Current-year and previous-year venue papers present |
| Graph/sequence mining | Comparing only against pre-transformer-era methods | At least one recent strong method compared, not just cited |
| KM / KG construction | Ignoring the current ecosystem (modern KG tooling, LLM-assisted curation) | Ecosystem named, position stated |
| Foundations | — | Foundational citations never go stale; DSSM-era work still anchors lineages |
Recency is about baselines even more than bibliography: citing a recent method
while comparing only against old ones is the version of staleness that costs
scores (cikm-experiments owns that half of the problem).
Citation hygiene mechanics
- Cite the published venue version once it exists — the CIKM/SIGIR/KDD record, not the arXiv preprint the PDF happened to be downloaded from. dblp resolves this in seconds and the ACM reference format carries the DOI.
- Keep bibliography entries consistent in format; a references section mixing five citation styles reads as assembled-by-paste, and at CIKM the references are uncounted — there is no budget excuse for truncated entries.
- When a line of work spans venues (the neural-matching lineage deliberately does), cite the actual hops rather than attributing the whole line to one venue — the misattribution guard above exists because reviewers notice.
Preprints, concurrency, and the declaration rule
CIKM 2026 bans concurrent submission outright and requires declaring any public
non-anonymized version on the EasyChair form (cikm-submission). In the related-work
text itself: cite your own preprint in third person like a stranger's work; cite
independent concurrent arXiv work neutrally with a technical contrast and no
priority argument; and never let a citation resolve the authors' identity (e.g., a
footnoted repository URL owned by an author).
Auditing the novelty sentence
The contribution statement should survive this adversarial read: for each clause, name the closest prior work that could claim the same clause, and state the surviving difference in mechanism terms, not adjective terms.
Draft: "We are the first to use knowledge graphs for enterprise search."
Audit: KG-for-search has a decade of work (the RippleNet-line alone applies KG propagation to ranking-adjacent tasks); "first" fails on contact. Repaired: "Prior KG-augmented retrieval assumes a static graph resolved at index time; we resolve links at query time against a continuously edited graph, which no prior system in this line supports." The repaired sentence names the lineage, concedes its existence, and stakes a mechanism-level difference a reviewer can verify rather than a primacy claim they can falsify with one citation — the only kind of novelty sentence that is safe in front of a pool this broad.
Output format
[Front coverage] retrieval / mining / KM-DB — each surveyed with nearest work named
[Boundary paragraph] <who-combined-what → gap → this paper's seam move>
[CIKM back-catalog] <own-venue milestones cited where they exist>
[Misattribution scan] <every "(CIKM 20xx)" dblp-checked; sibling classics placed right>
[Declaration state] <own preprints third-person, form declaration consistent>