ICDE 2027 Call for Research Papers

Topics of Interest

We invite the submission of original research contributions in the following areas of data engineering:

We expect that research contributions build on previous advances in the data engineering research community as published in ICDE or other core conferences such as VLDB and SIGMOD. We also welcome any original contributions that cross boundaries or point in other directions of interest to the data engineering research community.

Research track paper categories:

1. Regular research papers: Regular research papers present original contributions related to the topics of interest listed above.

2. Experimental, Analysis, and Benchmark (EAB): EAB papers focus on the extensive evaluation of algorithms, data structures, and systems that are of wide interest, or on benchmarks related to the topics of interest. The scientific contribution of an EAB paper lies in providing fundamentally new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of existing methods, or new ways to evaluate existing methods. The title of an EAB paper should start with the tag: "[Experiment, Analysis, and Benchmark]"; the tag will be removed in the CR of accepted EAB papers.

Important Dates

IEEE ICDE 2027 comprises two rounds of research track paper submissions. Each submission round provides an Accept/Reject notification without the option for revision.

Notification dates are approximate.

All deadlines are 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time.

Paper should be submitted using the Conference Management Tool https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICDE2027

The submission website will be open for submissions a week before the submission deadline of each round.

Instructions for Research Papers

• Template: Manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the IEEE format available at https://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.The use of negative space and content extending into the margins are considered violations of the format.
• ORCIDs: ORCIDs are required for all authors at the time of paper submission.
• Page limit: Research and EAB papers must not exceed 12 pages, excluding references and the AI-generated content acknowledgement (explained below). No appendix is allowed. Only electronic submissions in PDF format will be considered.
• Duplicate submissions: A paper submitted to ICDE 2027 cannot be under review for any other conference or journal during the entire time it is under consideration for ICDE 2027, and it must be substantially different from any previously published work. Hence, after you submit a paper to ICDE, you must await the response from ICDE and only resubmit elsewhere if your paper is rejected or withdrawn at your request from ICDE.
• Novelty requirement: A paper submitted to ICDE 2027 must present original work not described in any prior publication that is more than 4 double-column pages in length. A prior publication is a paper that has been accepted for presentation at a refereed conference or workshop with proceedings; or an article that has been accepted for publication in a refereed journal. If an ICDE 2027 submission has overlap with a prior publication, the submission must cite the prior publication, along with all other relevant published work, even if this prior publication is at or below the 4-page length threshold.
• Max submissions per author: An author may submit a maximum of 5 papers to the research track (regular and EAB papers combined) per submission round.
• 1-year wait: Papers rejected from ICDE cannot be submitted again to ICDE until a full year has passed from the time of their last submission. For example, submissions that are rejected in the first round of the IEEE ICDE 2027 research track are not eligible for re-submission to the second round. These papers can be submitted again in Round 1 of ICDE 2028.
• Single-blind anonymity: Submissions will be reviewed in a single-blind manner.
• No title/author change: After a paper is accepted, neither the set of authors nor the title of the paper can be changed. If warranted, reviewers may request a change of paper title to better align the paper's contents with the revised title.
• Special issue: A set of best papers will be selected for submission in extended form to be published in the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).
• Conference registration and presentation: Each accepted paper must be accompanied by a unique full registration to appear in the proceedings; presentation at the conference is not required. Accepted papers will be given a presentation slot at the conference only if an author is available to present the paper.

Review Process

ICDE 2027 papers will be reviewed by at least 3 reviewers. The reviewing of a paper will be coordinated by a senior PC member, who will provide a meta-review based on the discussions about the paper. The outcome is either “reject” or “accept”. There will be no revisions.

Supplemental Material

Authors are expected to submit supplemental material, such as code, data, and other implementation artifacts used to produce the results reported in this submission. Availability of the supplemental material will be considered in the evaluation of the paper. If the authors of a submission are unable to submit supplemental material, an explanation should be provided in the submission form. Experiment, Analysis, and Benchmark papers MUST provide all artifacts necessary to reproduce the results. No exceptions in this paper category are allowed. Supplemental material should be provided through a URL pointing to standard, openly accessible file sharing services with well-understood privacy policies (e.g., a public GitHub repo). Personal webpages or other solutions that can track back to the reviewers and jeopardize anonymity are not acceptable.

Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Generated Content

Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of a submission to ICDE 2027.

As per IEEE guidelines (https://icbc2025.ieee-icbc.org/ai-content-generation-guidelines), the use of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in a submission (including but not limited to text, figures, images, and code) shall be disclosed in the acknowledgments section.

For example, authors should mention tools (including LLMs) that were used for data processing, filtering, visualisation, and facilitating or running experiments. The AI system used shall be identified, and specific sections of the article that use AI-generated content shall be identified and accompanied by a brief explanation regarding the level at which the AI system was used to generate the content.

The use of AI systems for editing and grammar enhancement is common practice and, as such, is generally outside the intent of the above policy. Authors remain responsible for correctness and originality of the submitted content.

Inclusions and Diversity in Writing

We value diversity and inclusion in our community and profession. Be mindful in your writing of not using language or examples that further the marginalization, stereotyping, or erasure of any group of people, especially historically marginalized and/or under-represented groups (URGs) in computing. Also be vigilant and guard against unintentionally exclusionary examples. Reviewers will be empowered to monitor and demand changes if such issues arise. Going further, also consider actively raising the representation of URGs in your writing. Diversity of representation in writing is a simple but visible avenue to celebrate and ultimately help improve our community’s diversity.

Conflicts of Interest (CoIs)

The submission system will request CoI information. It is the full responsibility of all authors of a paper to identify all (and only) PC members with CoIs as per the definition provided below. Papers with incorrect or incomplete CoIs are subject to rejection.

Definition of Conflict of Interest: An author X of an ICDE 2027 research paper has a CoI with a PC or SPC member Y if and only if one or more of the following conditions hold:

• X and Y are co-authors of a paper or grant proposal in submission.
• X and Y are co-authors of a publication in the past three years.
• X and Y are co-authors of 4 or more publications in the last 10 years.
• X and Y have been co-workers in the same company or university within the past three years.
• X and Y have been collaborators within the past three years (e.g., held a joint grant).
• X is or was Y’s primary thesis advisor or vice versa, no matter how long ago.
• X is a relative or a close friend of Y (or vice versa).

Conflict declaration on CMT: To declare COIs in CMT, each author of a submission must create a CMT profile and complete it with domain and individual conflicts. If a CMT profile is missing even for one author of a submission, the paper will be desk rejected.

You can mark your conflicts by clicking on your name (upper right-hand side on CMT) and selecting "Domain Conflicts" and "Individual Conflicts". An author's declared conflicts will be automatically applied to all of their submissions.

Desk Rejection Policy

ICDE research track submissions that fail to meet the following requirements will be rejected without review (desk-rejected).

• Non-compliance with instructions: Failure to meet the instructions for research papers is a cause for desk-rejection.
• Formatting violations: Specifically, submissions must comply with the formatting and length requirements.
• COI violations: Authors must declare COIs correctly. Failure to report COIs or frivolous declaration of COIs count as violations. All submissions will be checked for violation via automated software.

• Relevance mismatch (out-of-scope): Any submission must align with at least one of the above topic areas defined for ICDE 2027 and must situate itself within the state-of-the-art of research in the data engineering community in general and within the selected topic(s) in particular.

  Submissions that are not directly relevant to the data engineering community are subject to desk rejection, even if they provide a compelling solution to an otherwise interesting problem. Such submissions should be submitted to a more thematically appropriate venue. For example, submissions that purely advance data mining or machine learning approaches not relating to data engineering aspects would be considered as out of scope.

  Authors who believe their submission may be viewed as falling into this category should provide an explanation (in 1000 characters) in the submission form as why their submission is within the scope of ICDE, e.g., by identifying (a) the key data engineering challenges addressed, (b) principled ideas and contributions that the submission brings to data engineering, with reference to specific sections of the submission, and (c) research already published in ICDE or other core outlets such as VLDB and SIGMOD that it builds on.

  Examples:

  1. "We propose a new ML technique that enables database systems to achieve X and we clearly demonstrate in the paper (theory, experiments) how the database systems achieve X though our new technique. In particular, in section Z we ..."
  2. "We propose a new indexing scheme or modify the query optimizer or we propose a new storage layout to improve the performance of ML or DM model X, and we clearly demonstrate this in the paper. In particular, in section Z we ..."
  3. "We propose a new machine-learning based method that addresses the following two topics as listed in the call for papers: …” The new method builds substantially on the following six papers published in ICDE, SIGMOD, and VLDB: …"
  4. "Although this work is not aligned with the core conference topics, we see that there was a work on the same problem published in a previous ICDE conference."

  Explanations in the spirit of #1-#3 will be in favor of the paper. Arguments like #4 are insufficient.

• Re-submission policy: Submissions that were desk-rejected in Round 1 due to COI violations or failure to follow length and formatting instructions may be resubmitted in Round 2. Submissions that were rejected in Round 1 for being out-of-scope for ICDE cannot be re-submitted in Round 2.
• Responsibility: The responsibility rests with the authors to ensure their paper meets all submission requirements.