thedixitjain SIGCOMM Review Process
Use this to reason about review-stage strategy. Reopen the current CFP and submission page before making process claims; the mechanisms below are the SIGCOMM 2026 rendering and can change per edition.
The outcome space is wider than accept/reject
SIGCOMM layers several author-facing stages, and reading which one you are in drives every subsequent move:
- Early reject. Submissions with a consensus to reject are notified before the formal date, so authors can redirect the work to another venue sooner. It is a courtesy, not a soft accept; there is no reply that reopens it.
- Rebuttal. Papers that advance to the discussion phase receive reviews and a chance to respond. This is the moment to correct factual errors and answer the decision-critical objection — not to relitigate taste.
- One-shot revision. A small set of papers get a merits summary plus a required-changes list, resubmit about a month later, and are re-reviewed by the same reviewers where possible under a PC shepherd. The name is literal: the revised paper can only be accepted or rejected, so the issue list is a contract, not a suggestion.
- Accept (with shepherding). Accepted papers may be assigned a shepherd who confirms the reviews are addressed through camera-ready and approves whether any appendix is necessary.
What reviewers weigh
| Review dimension | What raises it | What sinks it |
|---|---|---|
| Contribution | A networking mechanism or architecture that generalizes | A single-site tuning win with no transferable idea |
| Evaluation realism | Testbed, trace, or deployment evidence with reported tails | Simulation-only or mean-only results for a fabric claim |
| Baselines | Comparisons against the strongest deployed alternative | Straw-man baselines the mechanism is built to beat |
| Measurement rigor | Documented workload, topology, run counts, variance | Percentiles with no replication or unstated conditions |
| Clarity | A stated design principle the paper defends | A behavior described but no invariant named |
Who reviews here
The PC mixes networking-systems builders, measurement researchers, and theory-leaning networking people; expect at least one reviewer to interrogate the evaluation setup line by line and another to ask whether the mechanism generalizes beyond the tested topology. Because SIGCOMM is the broad flagship, a paper is often read against the strongest prior work in its exact subarea, so a missing state-of-the-art baseline is caught rather than skimmed past.
Stage-by-stage realism
- Reviews: triage by what the discussion and the eventual shepherd would weigh, not by reviewer tone; one unresolved evaluation-realism objection outweighs several style notes.
- Rebuttal: short and precise beats exhaustive; answer the objection that decides the paper and concede what cannot be fixed now.
- Revision: treat the required-changes list as the grading rubric; a revision that addresses adjacent points but dodges a listed issue is the recognizable one-shot failure.
- Shepherding: the shepherd is an ally who signs off the final version, including appendix necessity — engage early through HotCRP comments rather than surfacing surprises at the camera-ready deadline.
Output format
[Current stage] submitted / reviews / rebuttal / revision / decision / camera-ready
[Outcome class] early reject / rebuttal / one-shot revision / accept-with-shepherd
[Decision actors] <reviewers / discussion / shepherd / chairs>
[Likely leverage] <contribution / evaluation realism / baselines / measurement / clarity>
[Forbidden moves] <identity leak / new unsupported results / dodging the issue list>
[Next response move] <one action>
Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → SIGCOMM-Skills/skills/sigcomm-review-process/SKILL.md