Call for Papers for Doctoral Consortium

The ACM SIGIR Doctoral Consortium provides doctoral students with a unique opportunity to have substantive interaction with other researchers regarding their proposed dissertation research.

The objectives of the Doctoral Consortium are:

• To provide a forum where doctoral students can present and discuss their proposed research with experienced IR researchers the members of the Doctoral Consortium Program Committee.
• To give students an opportunity to establish a supportive community of other doctoral students at the same stage of their dissertation research as themselves.

The Consortium will take place on the same day as the Tutorials, with the format being: student presentations with plenary discussions, lunch, individual meetings with experienced researchers, and dinner.

Prospective student attendees should have written, or be close to completing, a thesis proposal. Prior to submission, discussion of this with the students PhD advisor / supervisor should be held to ensure the student meets this criterion. It is also desirable that the student not to be so close to completion of their dissertation that discussion would have little or no impact on the dissertation research.

Selection for attendance at the Doctoral Consortium will be based on a written paper, singly authored by the student wishing to attend the Consortium. Abstracts of the papers will be published in the SIGIR Conference Proceedings.

Papers must be submitted electronically, via the submission web page. We will accept papers only in PDF format. It is the responsibility of authors to ensure that their papers use no unusual format features and are printable on a standard printer. Submissions must arrive on or before March 11, 2007.

Doctoral students who submit to the Consortium are permitted, and indeed encouraged, to submit a full SIGIR paper or poster on their research. However, acceptance for participation in the Consortium will be based solely on the paper submitted for the Consortium.

SIGIR will provide travel grants for students attending the Consortium, which will cover registration for the Conference and part of the travel costs.

Content guidelines

The Consortium submission paper will be the basis for detailed discussions at the Consortium, and to get the most out of the discussion, a paper should include the following:

• Motivation for the proposed research
• Background and related work (with key references)
• Description of proposed research including main research questions
• Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate)
• Particular issues highlighted for discussion.

In addition, a one page appendix to the paper (placed after the references) should include the following:

• A detailed statement by the student saying why he / she wants to attend the Consortium.
• A statement by their advisor / supervisor saying how the student would benefit by attending the Consortium. Advisors should also state whether the student has written, or is close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent).

All papers will be reviewed with respect to overall quality of presentation, the potential for future impact of the proposed PhD research on the field of Information Retrieval, and the likely benefit to the student of attending the Consortium. Given that the abstract will be published, the abstract will be critically reviewed.

Format

Effectively, the same format is used for Consortium papers as for full SIGIR papers. LaTeX and Word templates for SIGIR submissions are available from the ACM Website. The first page must contain the title of the paper, full author name, affiliation and contact details, and an abstract of up to 250 words, and up to 3 keywords describing the topic areas. The papers will be reviewed by the members of the Doctoral Consortium Program Committee. The final version of the paper should be no more than 5 double-column pages in the standard SIGIR format, including all figures and bibliography, but not including the appendix. All correspondence with the author will be through email.

All Consortium paper submissions must include a set of ACM Computing Reviews categories and keywords that describe the contents of the paper. These categories and keywords must appear after the Abstract and before the Introduction. Information about selecting and formatting categories and keywords can be found in ACM Web pages on how to use the computing classification system and in the LaTeX and Word templates.

Essentially, the format for Consortium papers follows almost exactly that for full papers, and provides useful experience in preparing papers for the SIGIR Conference. Note, the accepted papers will not be published in the SIGIR Conference Proceedings; only the abstracts will be published.

Consortium papers must be submitted electronically via the submission web page.