--- name: cikm-related-work description: Use when positioning a CIKM submission against three literatures at once — retrieval, mining, and knowledge management/databases — building the boundary-work paragraph, guarding against misattributing SIGIR/KDD/ICDM classics to CIKM, and handling preprints under the arXiv-declaration and dual-submission rules. --- # CIKM Related Work Related work at CIKM is a three-front obligation. A submission claiming the IR-mining-KM boundary must show command of each literature it borrows from, plus the smaller literature that lives *on* the boundary — much of which is CIKM's own back catalog. A section citing only one lane tells two-thirds of the reviewer pool that their field's relevant results may be unknown to the authors. ## Three-front coverage plan | Front | Lineage to command | What its reviewer checks | |---|---|---| | Retrieval | Ranking models, neural matching (DRMM-line), evaluation practice | Is the nearest ranking method compared or distinguished? | | Mining | Representation learning (GraRep-line), graph/sequence models, scale methods | Is the mechanism's delta over the nearest mining method stated? | | KM / databases | Entity linking (TAGME-line), integration, KG construction and quality | Is the data-management cost and lineage acknowledged? | The verified exemplars in `../../resources/exemplars/library.md` mark where these lineages pass through CIKM itself; citing the venue's own milestones — DSSM for click-supervised semantic matching, RippleNet/BERT4Rec for KG- and transformer-based recommendation — signals to the panel that the authors know whose house they are submitting to. ## The boundary-work paragraph After the three lane surveys, CIKM related-work sections need one paragraph the single-lane venues do not: the works that already tried to combine the same lanes. Structure it as three sentences — *who combined what* ("X fused KG signals into ranking..."), *what they could not do* ("...but only for static graphs at million-triple scale"), *what this paper changes at the seam* ("we make the fusion incremental, which is what deployment requires"). Reviewers use exactly this paragraph to locate the contribution; write it so it can be quoted in a meta-review. ## Misattribution guard CIKM sits so close to its siblings that venue misattribution is a live review risk — and a credibility hit when a reviewer authored the misplaced paper. Checked traps (dblp-verified, 2026-07-08): - **DeepWalk, node2vec, metapath2vec → KDD**, not CIKM; CIKM's graph-embedding milestone is **GraRep (CIKM 2015)**. - **SASRec → ICDM 2018**; the transformer-recommender at CIKM is **BERT4Rec (CIKM 2019)**. - **NGCF and LightGCN → SIGIR** (2019/2020); CIKM's KG-recommendation landmark is **RippleNet (CIKM 2018)**. - **Conv-KNRM → WSDM 2018**, while **DRMM → CIKM 2016**; the neural-IR lineage hops venues paper by paper. - **TransE → NeurIPS 2013** — KG-embedding origins are not CIKM even though KG applications are core CIKM territory. Rule: before writing "(CIKM 20xx)", confirm on dblp's `conf/cikm` index; before writing "prior CIKM work has not...", search the last three CIKM proceedings in the ACM DL — with many hundreds of papers per recent edition, the prior work usually exists. ## Recency expectations by front The three fronts age at different speeds, and reviewers calibrate accordingly. A workable recency floor when drafting: | Front | Staleness signal reviewers flag | Floor | |---|---|---| | Neural retrieval / RAG-adjacent | No baseline or citation from the last ~18 months | Current-year and previous-year venue papers present | | Graph/sequence mining | Comparing only against pre-transformer-era methods | At least one recent strong method compared, not just cited | | KM / KG construction | Ignoring the current ecosystem (modern KG tooling, LLM-assisted curation) | Ecosystem named, position stated | | Foundations | — | Foundational citations never go stale; DSSM-era work still anchors lineages | Recency is about baselines even more than bibliography: citing a recent method while comparing only against old ones is the version of staleness that costs scores (`cikm-experiments` owns that half of the problem). ## Citation hygiene mechanics - Cite the **published venue version** once it exists — the CIKM/SIGIR/KDD record, not the arXiv preprint the PDF happened to be downloaded from. dblp resolves this in seconds and the ACM reference format carries the DOI. - Keep bibliography entries consistent in format; a references section mixing five citation styles reads as assembled-by-paste, and at CIKM the references are uncounted — there is no budget excuse for truncated entries. - When a line of work spans venues (the neural-matching lineage deliberately does), cite the actual hops rather than attributing the whole line to one venue — the misattribution guard above exists because reviewers notice. ## Preprints, concurrency, and the declaration rule CIKM 2026 bans concurrent submission outright and requires declaring any public non-anonymized version on the EasyChair form (`cikm-submission`). In the related-work text itself: cite your own preprint in third person like a stranger's work; cite independent concurrent arXiv work neutrally with a technical contrast and no priority argument; and never let a citation resolve the authors' identity (e.g., a footnoted repository URL owned by an author). ## Auditing the novelty sentence The contribution statement should survive this adversarial read: for each clause, name the closest prior work that could claim the same clause, and state the surviving difference in mechanism terms, not adjective terms. > Draft: "We are the first to use knowledge graphs for enterprise search." Audit: KG-for-search has a decade of work (the RippleNet-line alone applies KG propagation to ranking-adjacent tasks); "first" fails on contact. Repaired: "Prior KG-augmented retrieval assumes a static graph resolved at index time; we resolve links at query time against a continuously edited graph, which no prior system in this line supports." The repaired sentence names the lineage, concedes its existence, and stakes a mechanism-level difference a reviewer can verify rather than a primacy claim they can falsify with one citation — the only kind of novelty sentence that is safe in front of a pool this broad. ## Output format ```text [Front coverage] retrieval / mining / KM-DB — each surveyed with nearest work named [Boundary paragraph] [CIKM back-catalog] [Misattribution scan] [Declaration state] ```