Edbt writing style

EDBT Writing Style

Use this when revising the main paper. EDBT papers are read by database-systems reviewers and published open access on OpenProceedings, so they need a data-management contribution stated on the first page and an evaluation a skeptic trusts. The failure this skill prevents is a technically fine paper that reads like a vague performance claim or a re-skinned ML result with a database title.

Revision rules

• Lead with the data-management contribution: the concrete problem (a storage, query-processing, indexing, transaction, integration, or data-quality problem), why current systems fall short, the contribution (mechanism and/or study), the evidence on real workloads, and what it enables.
• Make the mechanism reproducible in prose. Describe the algorithm, data structures, parameters, and system integration precisely enough that a competent reader could reimplement it — vagueness here is the "I cannot tell how it works" revise.
• Pair every claim with proportional evidence — a real workload, a tuned baseline, a measurement at realistic scale with reported variance — not adjectives like "significantly faster."
• State scope honestly, in the body. Name where the technique helps, where it is neutral, and its overhead or failure cases; quantify them rather than hiding them. A database reviewer's first two objections are usually "unfair baseline" and "unrealistic scale" — pre-empt both.
• Respect the per-shape page budget as a design constraint (Regular / Experiments-&-Analysis ≤12 pages; Vision ≤6; references unlimited — reverify per cycle). References do not count, but figures, tables, and appendices in the body do.
• Use the OpenProceedings/host template, not acmart or IEEEtran carried from a US venue.

Paper-shape skeletons

Regular / applied-systems paper

Section	Job it must do	Common failure
Intro	Problem, inadequacy, contribution, evidence preview, what it enables — first page	Leads with "data is growing," not a concrete problem
Background / Motivation	Why current systems fall short, grounded	Motivation by assertion
Approach / System	The mechanism + integration, reproducibly	Described too thinly to reimplement
Evaluation	Each claim answered on real workloads vs. tuned baselines	Unnamed dataset, untuned baseline, toy scale
Scope / Discussion	Where it helps, is neutral, or costs; quantified	Limits hidden or hand-waved
Related work	Delta-first positioning against DB venues	Citation catalog with no contrast

Experiments & Analysis paper — the study is the contribution: foreground the methodology (subjects, metrics, fairness, coverage, repeatability) and treat the findings as the deliverable, not a new system.

Vision paper — a tight argument for a new direction: the problem, why now, the sketch of an approach, and the research agenda, within the short budget; no need for a full evaluation, but the argument must be disciplined.

Sentence-level rewrites

Draft pattern	EDBT-safe rewrite
"Our system is significantly faster."	"reduces median query latency by X% (variance over N runs) vs. <tuned baseline> on <workload>"
"We evaluate on a large dataset."	"We evaluate on <named workload/logs>, sizes ..., cluster of ... workers; config in the artifact"
"Results show our approach works well."	"Under skew, straggler time drops by ...; on uniform keys, overhead is ...% (Table 2)"
"State-of-the-art performance."	Claim scoped to the workloads, metrics, and scale actually tested
"Our method scales."	"throughput holds from 8 to 128 workers (Fig. 2); beyond that is untested"

Scope discipline

[Where it helps]     name the regime (e.g. concentrated, detectable skew) and show it
[Where it is neutral] show the no-op case (e.g. uniform keys) so the reviewer trusts you
[What it costs]      quantify overhead / memory / setup, not "negligible"
[Where it fails]     state the boundary (e.g. very short queries) and measure it
-> put each of these next to the affected result, not in a deferred paragraph

Vignette: compressing an over-scoped systems paper

A draft with a sprawling background, five contributions, and nine plots: keep the two contributions the evaluation actually supports, the plots that carry the headline result and the overhead case, and a tight scope subsection; move parameter sweeps and secondary configurations to the artifact with explicit forward references. The test of a good cut: a reviewer should be able to answer "what does it do, on what workloads, versus what baseline, and what does it cost?" from the body alone.

Output format

[Writing diagnosis] clear / under-motivated / over-claimed / evidence-mismatched / over-scoped
[Shape] Regular / Experiments-&-Analysis / Vision — budget respected?
[First-page fix] <new framing leading with the data-management contribution>
[Claim audit] <claim -> workload/baseline/scale -> where answered -> proportional? yes/no>
[Scope fix] <where-it-helps / neutral / cost / failure, placed by the result>
[Template] host/OpenProceedings template in use? yes/no