# Sigir Topic Selection > Use when deciding whether a project belongs at SIGIR and in which of its tracks — testing whether retrieval is the contribution or the plumbing, forking across full/short/resources/reproducibility/perspectives/industry, and routing misfits to ECIR, CIKM, WSDM, CHIIR, ICTIR, RecSys, TheWebConf, or NLP/ML venues. - Skill: `thedixitjain/sigir-topic-selection` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds add thedixitjain/sigir-topic-selection` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/thedixitjain/sigir-topic-selection/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: thedixitjain (https://skillmd.com/u/thedixitjain) - Updated: 2026-09-08 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/thedixitjain/sigir-topic-selection --- # SIGIR Topic Selection Two decisions, in order: (1) is this an information-retrieval contribution at all, and (2) which SIGIR track owns it. Both are cheaper to get right in October than to learn from reviews in March. SIGIR 2026's verified lineup — Full, Short, Perspectives, Resources, Reproducibility, Low Resource Environments, and Industry tracks — makes the second decision genuinely multi-way. ## Test 1: is retrieval the contribution or the plumbing? The LLM era floods SIGIR with papers where retrieval is present but incidental. The discriminating question: **if you swapped the retrieval component for an oracle (or a black box), would the contribution survive?** - Survives → the contribution is the downstream system (agent, QA, generation quality); route to an NLP/ML venue and cite IR work properly. - Dies → the contribution is retrieval: ranking quality, efficiency, evaluation validity, user search behavior, or the retrieval-specific part of RAG (candidate quality, index design, retrieval evaluation). SIGIR-shaped. Corollary signals of SIGIR fit: the natural headline table has metric@cutoff columns on named collections; the natural reviewers are IR-evaluation people; the natural related work includes SIGIR/TOIS/TREC lineage (see `sigir-related-work`). ## Test 2: the track fork | Your strongest honest sentence starts with... | Track | 2026 anchor | |---|---|---| | "We propose/analyze a method and show on N collections..." | Full papers | ≤9 pp excl. refs, double-blind | | "We report one focused finding..." | Short papers | ≤4 pp excl. refs, own OpenReview group | | "We built and share a corpus/toolkit/judgments..." | Resources | ≤6 pp + refs, **single-anonymous** | | "We reproduced (or failed to reproduce) published results..." | Reproducibility | Own track in 2026; details 待核实 | | "We argue the field should..." | Perspectives | Details 待核实 | | "We deployed retrieval in production and learned..." | Industry (SIRIP lineage) | Details 待核实 | | "Search under compute/connectivity/language constraints..." | Low Resource Environments | Feb 5 abstract, Apr 2 notify (2026) | Fork rules of thumb: - A full paper needs a *rounded* evidence program; a strong single finding with one collection and one deep analysis is a better short paper than a thin full paper. - The dataset built for your method paper is a **separate routing decision** — the cross-track double-submission ban means the dataset goes to Resources only if it is not the method paper's claimed contribution. - Reproducibility is for studies *about* prior results, not for "our paper has good reproducibility" (that's `sigir-reproducibility` hygiene). ## Neighbor routing when SIGIR isn't the answer ```text Contribution center of gravity -> Better first target --------------------------------------------------------------- Interactive/user-study search behavior -> CHIIR (then SIGIR full) Formal/theoretical IR models -> ICTIR (SIGIR-affiliated) Recommender systems end-to-end -> RecSys (SIGIR takes rec too, esp. retrieval-flavored: NGCF/LightGCN lineage) Web platform/graph/user data emphasis -> TheWebConf (WWW) or WSDM IR + knowledge management/databases -> CIKM European timing or repro emphasis -> ECIR Language-technology contribution -> ACL/EMNLP (retrieval as application) Efficiency/systems below the ranking -> systems venues; keep an IR-eval slice for SIGIR Evaluation campaign participation -> TREC/NTCIR/CLEF tracks (not archival substitutes: they *feed* SIGIR papers) ``` TREC deserves the explicit note: it is an evaluation campaign, not a proceedings competitor. Building on (or contributing to) a TREC track is often the strongest possible SIGIR pipeline — campaign participation year 1, analysis paper year 2. ## Borderline cases, adjudicated - **RAG for a downstream task, with a retrieval ablation**: if the ablation is the deepest result, extract it into a retrieval-evaluation paper for SIGIR and let the system paper go to NLP — two focused papers beat one blurry one. - **An LLM that rewrites queries**: SIGIR-shaped *if* evaluated as a retrieval intervention (per-topic deltas on standard collections), NLP-shaped if evaluated on rewrite quality. - **A new efficiency trick inside an index structure**: SIGIR wants the quality-cost frontier; a pure throughput result without ranking-quality context fits systems venues better. - **A user study of searchers**: CHIIR first unless there is a measurable system-side consequence (a re-ranker, an interface signal) evaluated IR-style. - **An evaluation critique with no fix**: Perspectives material, or pair it with a demonstrated protocol improvement and aim for full papers. ## Timing and prestige honesty - SIGIR's single annual cycle (January-pattern deadline) means a misrouted submission costs a year unless the fallback ring is pre-planned (`sigir-workflow`). Route by contribution type, not venue rank. - Short papers at SIGIR are archival, cited, and respected — routing a focused finding there is a strategy, not a demotion. - If the honest evidence today is one collection, no significance testing, and an unfinished ablation, the choice is not "which track" but "which *cycle*" — a rushed January submission burns the year anyway. One more timing lever: the staggered secondary-track calendar (Resources and LRE ran weeks behind full papers in 2026) sometimes lets a January full-paper miss become a same-year February resource or reproducibility submission — but only if the contribution genuinely re-frames, not as a costume change reviewers see through. ## Scope vocabulary check SIGIR's own topic language (2026 full-papers page): search and ranking, queries and query analysis, web search, retrieval models and ranking, efficiency and scalability (indexing, crawling, compression), recommender systems — plus the community's standing breadth: evaluation, conversational search, and retrieval-augmented systems. If the abstract cannot be written naturally in this vocabulary, revisit Test 1. ## Output format ```text [IR-contribution test] survives-oracle-swap: yes (route out) / no (SIGIR-shaped) [Track] full / short / resources / reproducibility / perspectives / industry / LRE [Fork rationale] [Cross-track conflicts] dataset/method ownership resolved y/n [Fallback ring] [Cycle honesty] submit this cycle / build one more quarter ``` --- **Source:** [`brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills`](https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) → `SIGIR-Skills/skills/sigir-topic-selection/SKILL.md`