ICDE Review Process

Use this to reason about review-stage strategy. Reopen the current call, important-dates page, and any reviewer instructions before making process claims; ICDE re-declares its review model each edition.

Process model

• ICDE takes research papers in two rounds per edition (ICDE 2027: ≈June and November). Each paper draws at least three reviewers, coordinated by an area chair who synthesizes the reviews into a recommendation.
• The ICDE 2026 model ran two reviewing phases inside a round: the first phase returned Revise & Resubmit, Accept, or Reject; invited revisions were re-reviewed (≈4-week window) before a final Accept/Reject. Whether the current edition keeps the R&R phase is edition-specific (待核实).
• Review is single-blind: reviewers see author identity; authors do not see reviewers. This changes the calculus — reputational priors exist, so the paper must earn belief on evidence, not on names.
• A Round 1 reject is terminal for the edition; the paper cannot re-enter Round 2. That raises the stakes on getting the evaluation right the first time.
• Accepted papers publish in IEEE Xplore; camera-ready compliance and IEEE metadata matter as much as the acceptance itself.

Who reviews here

• The committee is builder-heavy: reviewers who have implemented indexes, optimizers, and storage engines. They read an evaluation the way an engineer reads a benchmark — skeptical of untuned baselines, single-point results, and hidden costs.
• Because scope overlaps SIGMOD and VLDB, at least one reviewer will likely know the nearest prior system intimately; a novelty claim that ignores it is caught, not skimmed past.
• Borderline systems papers usually fail on one of three edges: an untuned or unfair baseline, a performance claim with no operating point, or a mechanism whose benefit is never isolated by an ablation.

Scoring leverage table

Review dimension	What raises it	What sinks it
Novelty	A named mechanism a builder could not have trivially derived	"Yet another index" with no isolable new idea
Evaluation	Tuned baselines, scale curves, variance, disclosed cost	Single-point wins on one synthetic workload
Soundness	Ablations that isolate the mechanism's contribution	Gains that could come from unrelated engineering
Reproducibility	Runnable supplement whose availability is evident	Empty or unrunnable supplemental material
Significance	A primitive an ecosystem can adopt	A narrow tweak with no downstream reach

Stage-by-stage realism

• Phase 1 reviews: read them as the area chair will — is the central evaluation objection answerable? A Revise & Resubmit is an opportunity, not a soft reject; treat the requirement list as binding.
• Revision re-review: the same reviewers check the list; unrequested scope changes hurt.
• Decision: one unresolved fairness or cost objection outweighs several resolved clarity nits, because a builder-heavy committee anchors on the evaluation.
• Round choice as strategy: since Round 1 rejects skip the edition, aiming an immature evaluation at the earlier round is a common self-inflicted loss.

Output format

[Current stage] submitted / phase-1 reviews / revision / decision / camera-ready
[Round] Round 1 or Round 2 (edition)
[Decision actors] <reviewers / area chair / program chairs>
[Likely leverage] <novelty / evaluation / soundness / reproducibility>
[Central objection] <the one thing the area chair will weigh most>
[Next response move] <one action>