Soda review process

SODA Review Process

SODA is run jointly by the SIAM Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics and ACM SIGACT, with a fresh program committee appointed for each edition — there is no standing editorial board, and every policy below is re-decided annually. Anchor facts for the 2027 cycle (checked 2026-07-08 via SIAM SODA27 pages read through search renderings, plus organizer announcements): submission July 9, 2026 AoE on HotCRP; reviews to authors by September 1; responses due September 4; decisions and instructions in October 2026. The 2027 PC chairs were not yet indexed at check time: 待核实. For scale context, SODA 2026's chair reported the largest submission pool in SODA history, roughly a 25% jump year-over-year (reported via the PC chair's public announcement; treat as reported, not official).

Pipeline anatomy

Phase (2027 anchors)	What happens	Author-side reality
July 9	HotCRP closes	The record is frozen; nothing is added later
July	Bidding and assignment	Your title-page abstract and topic tags determine who reads you
July-August	Refereeing, often with external subreviewers	The full version is the reviewed object; depth checks are real
By September 1	Initial reviews released	Read for factual errors first, opinions second
September 4	Responses due	Three days; preparation happened in August (soda-author-response)
September-October	PC discussion and ranking	Reviews are debated; the response is evidence in that debate
October	Decisions + final instructions	Accept/reject; no shepherding tier by default (待核实 per cycle)

Who reads you: the subreviewer economy

A large-pool theory conference distributes much of its reading to external subreviewers — domain experts recruited per paper by PC members. Consequences:

• Expect one deep technical review (the subreviewer who works in your niche) and broader reviews weighing significance. Write for both: airtight proofs and a first-ten-pages case for why the bound matters (soda-writing-style).
• Subreviewers check lineage. A comparison table that omits the actual state-of-the-art bound will be caught by the one person who proved it.
• Expertise variance is the norm, not a scandal. The rebuttal exists partly to arbitrate when the deep review and a skim review disagree.

Lightweight double-blind, referee's view

Referees see no author names, but SODA's rules keep the literature intact: authors post to arXiv freely and cite themselves in third person. In practice many referees can guess authorship; the process is designed to remove the default weight of names from triage, not to guarantee ignorance. Author-side consequences: never rely on reputation carrying a thin section, and never burn words hiding a self-citation the rules told you to keep visible.

What moves a borderline paper

PC discussions compress each paper into a few sentences. The compressible virtues:

• A named open problem or barrier the result resolves or bypasses — with the citation where it was posed.
• A clean headline bound: "first deterministic near-linear time" survives compression; "improves several parameters in some regimes" does not.
• A transferable technique a PC member can imagine using elsewhere.
• A decisive rebuttal correction of the most negative review's factual core.

And the compressible sins: a bound worse than known work (fatal), a proof the deep review could not verify (near-fatal), scope mismatch better served by a satellite or sibling venue (soda-topic-selection).

Interpreting the calendar's silences

Author anxiety maps poorly onto PC reality; this table converts one to the other for the 2027 anchors:

What you observe	What it usually means	What it does not mean
No confirmation beyond HotCRP receipt in July	Normal; assignment is in progress	Nothing about your paper's fate
Reviews arrive well before September 1	A punctual referee pool	Neither enthusiasm nor doom
One review far shorter than the others	A triage-level read alongside deep ones	Not automatically negative — check its F/L content
A referee question phrased as a request for computation	Your rebuttal's highest-value target	Not an acceptance signal
Silence from September 5 to October	Deliberation; scores are being argued	No news is literally no news
Decision earlier or later within October	PC logistics	Nothing paper-specific

The single decision authors control in this period is rebuttal quality; the single mistake available is contacting PC members outside HotCRP, which converts a borderline paper into a conflict-of-interest incident.

Reading a SODA review packet

For each review, classify every substantive sentence:
  F  factual claim about your paper      -> verifiable; rebut if wrong
  L  literature claim (prior bound, who did what) -> check the citation yourself
  S  significance judgment               -> rebuttal leverage is low
  C  correctness doubt                   -> highest priority; answer with page numbers
Then decide: does the packet's most negative review rest on F/L errors
(rebuttable) or on S consensus (usually terminal for this cycle)?

After the decision

• Accept: October instructions start the camera-ready track (soda-camera-ready).
• Reject with correctness doubts: repair the proof before any resubmission; theory reviewer pools overlap heavily across SODA, STOC, FOCS, ESA, and ICALP, and a resubmitted known bug follows the paper.
• Reject on significance: re-route rather than re-argue — ITCS for conceptual framing, ESA/ICALP for strong-but-specialized algorithmics, SOSA if the real contribution is a simplification (soda-workflow has the calendar).

Output format

[Process stage] <where the paper sits in the 2027 pipeline>
[Review triage] <F/L/S/C classification summary per review>
[Rebuttal leverage] <high/medium/low, with the deciding factor>
[Post-decision route] <camera-ready / repair / re-route target>