--- name: soda-review-process description: Use when reasoning about how a SODA (ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms) submission is evaluated — the per-edition program committee under joint ACM-SIAM sponsorship, HotCRP triage of a record-size submission pool, lightweight double-blind refereeing of full versions, the September rebuttal, and October decisions. --- # 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 ```text 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 ```text [Process stage] [Review triage] [Rebuttal leverage] [Post-decision route] ```