Icde topic selection

ICDE Topic Selection

Use this before writing. ICDE is strongest for data engineering — the design, building, management, and evaluation of data-intensive systems — where the contribution is a reconstructable data-management primitive with a systems-grade evaluation.

The data-management-primitive test

Ask what primitive the paper advances: an access method, a query operator, an execution or storage mechanism, a transaction or concurrency protocol, a data integration/cleaning/provenance technique, or a scalable analytics engine. If no primitive exists — if the database is merely a container for a result that lives elsewhere — the ICDE framing does not exist either.

Routing from ICDE's seat: the three-venue triangle

The scopes of ICDE, SIGMOD, and VLDB overlap almost entirely, so routing is usually about calendar geometry and house culture, not topic. Deciding from ICDE's seat:

If the deciding factor is...	Lean toward	Because
You want two fixed shots a year and IEEE-Xplore proceedings	ICDE	Two rounds per edition (≈June + November), single-blind, IEEE format
You want quarterly journal-style rounds with a formal revision and a rejection embargo	SIGMOD / PACMMOD	Four rounds on the 17th, double-anonymous, 12-month embargo
You want to pick any month and submit on a rolling calendar	VLDB / PVLDB	Twelve monthly deadlines on the 1st, single-blind, revise verdict
The work is a shipped production system with deployment evidence	ICDE industry track (or SIGMOD industrial)	Non-academic co-author, production-scale story
The work needs journal-length treatment	IEEE TKDE or The VLDB Journal	Full-length exposition; ICDE best papers are invited to extend into TKDE anyway
The work is European-database-community facing	EDBT	Overlapping scope, different community and calendar

Fit signal table

Signal in the project	ICDE reading
A new index, operator, or storage layout with a systems evaluation	Core fit — the house genre
A concurrency/transaction protocol exploiting new hardware	Core fit (cf. the Bw-Tree exemplar)
A platform primitive an ecosystem can build on	Core fit (cf. the SpatialHadoop exemplar)
A production cloud-database architecture with deployment lessons	Industry and applications track
An ML model that happens to run on data	Route to an ML venue unless the DB primitive is the contribution
A pure theory result with no system or workload	Route to a theory or journal venue

Sharpening moves before committing

• Name the primitive in one sentence. "We make ordering a read-time cost so ingestion is write-bandwidth-bound" is a primitive; "we improve time-series databases" is a topic.
• Check the round you can actually hit. Because a Round 1 reject skips you to the next edition, do not aim a half-built system at Round 1 just because it is sooner.
• Decide research vs. industry honestly. If the evidence is production scale and the novelty is engineering-at-scale rather than a new mechanism, the industry track fits better and reviews you on the right axis.
• Topic emphasis and track boundaries drift between editions; scan the current call's topic list before final routing.

Output format

[Fit] strong ICDE / possible ICDE / better elsewhere
[Primitive] <one-sentence data-management primitive, or "none">
[Best venue] ICDE-research / ICDE-industry / SIGMOD / PVLDB / TKDE / EDBT / other
[Round target] Round 1 or Round 2 of which edition, if ICDE
[Top rejection risk] <novelty / evaluation / scope / wrong-track>
[Next action] <build, measure, reframe, or venue switch>