Skills Soft Skills Guidelines for Conference Paper Submission

Guidelines for Conference Paper Submission

v20260724
eurosys-supplementary
A comprehensive guide detailing how to structure and submit highly technical papers to major academic conferences (e.g., EuroSys). It outlines the 'four shelves'—the 12-page core argument, references, artifact repositories, and appendices—ensuring that the main, decision-critical evidence is always contained within the primary reviewed pages, preventing the submission from failing due to overflow.
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Overview

EuroSys Supplementary

Use this when a EuroSys draft overflows its 12 pages of technical content. The governing fact (EuroSys 2027 CFP, rendered 2026-07-08): the budget is 12 pages of technical content plus unlimited reference pages. Whether the current round accepts appendices beyond the references, or a separate supplementary upload in HotCRP, is per-cycle policy that was not verifiable on 2026-07-08 — 待核实 in the live CFP and the HotCRP submission form before relying on either.

The four shelves

Shelf Review status What belongs there
12 technical pages Fully reviewed, the paper Design, key mechanisms, headline evaluation, honest limitations
Reference pages Free, always allowed Bibliography only — never technical content disguised as notes
Anonymized artifact repo Reviewer-optional Code, configs, full result sets, extra graphs, raw logs
Extended tech report / appendix Only if the round permits (待核实) Proofs, protocol details, exhaustive parameter sweeps

The iron rule across all shelves: a reviewer who reads only the 12 pages must be able to accept the paper. Anything reviewer-optional is corroboration, not argument. If the claim's only support sits on shelf 3 or 4, the claim is unsupported at decision time.

What systems reviewers push outward — and what they don't

Safe to externalize:

  • Full configuration dumps and tuning grids behind a summarized sensitivity plot.
  • Per-benchmark breakdowns when the body shows the aggregate plus the outliers.
  • Formal-model details for a mechanism whose intuition the body already conveys.
  • Additional workloads that repeat, rather than extend, the body's conclusion.

Dangerous to externalize at EuroSys:

  • The baseline-fairness evidence (versions, tuning) — its absence from the body reads as concealment, the single most corrosive suspicion in systems review.
  • The one experiment that tests the design's stated weakness.
  • Failure-handling behavior for a system whose pitch is reliability.

Anonymized repository mechanics

When linking supporting material from a double-blind submission:

# Build an identity-clean mirror rather than sanitizing in place
git clone --depth 1 file:///lab/systemX systemX-anon && cd systemX-anon
rm -rf .git && grep -rInE 'university|lab-name|@|githubusercontent' . | less
# fix hits, then publish to an anonymous host (e.g., an anonymized-repo service)
  • Strip commit history entirely; author fields in old commits are the classic leak.
  • Check config files and comments for hostnames, cluster names, and usernames.
  • Keep the mirror frozen during review so reviewers see one consistent state.

Reference-page hygiene

The unlimited reference allowance is generous, not lawless:

  • Bibliography pages hold citations — footnote essays, extended tables, or "notes" sections smuggled after the references invite a compliance read of the whole paper.
  • Cite the version that supports the claim: a versioned release or paper, not a bare project homepage that will drift.
  • Under double-blind, reference entries for your own artifacts must not resolve to identifying URLs; cite the anonymized mirror during review.
  • Long URLs and dataset citations belong in the bibliography, where they are free, rather than inline where they spend technical-page budget.

Micro-example: a 13.5-page draft

A distributed-tracing paper is 1.5 pages over. The cuts that worked, in order of pain: the second motivating scenario compressed to two sentences (0.4 pages); three per-workload latency plots collapsed into one CDF panel with the full set moved to the artifact repository (0.5 pages); the formal-consistency argument reduced to its statement plus intuition, full treatment in the repo's design note (0.4 pages); prose narration of Figure 4 deleted because the caption already said it (0.2 pages). Nothing reviewers needed for the accept/reject call left the body — that is the test each cut must pass.

Overflow triage, in order

  1. Compress prose before cutting content — systems drafts carry 10–15% slack in restated motivations and figure narration.
  2. Merge figures that make one point; delete figures that make none.
  3. Move corroborating (not load-bearing) material to the artifact repo with a one-line pointer in the body.
  4. Only then consider an appendix or tech report, after confirming the round's policy (待核实) and remembering reviewers owe it nothing.

Coordination with the review timeline

  • Whatever optional material accompanies the submission must be final at the paper gate; there is no mid-review update channel, and a stale repo contradicting the PDF is worse than no repo.
  • If a rebuttal phase exists, it cannot introduce a new supplement — externalized material must already be in place to be pointed at.
  • A one-shot revision, by contrast, is a full resubmission: the revised round is the moment to promote material inward (e.g., a boundary experiment the conditions demanded) rather than to grow the repo.

Output format

[Page pressure] <current overflow in pages>
[Shelf plan] <item -> body / references / artifact repo / appendix-if-allowed>
[Decision-critical check] <claims whose evidence would leave the body: none / list>
[Anonymity status of repo] <clean / leaks found>
[待核实] <does this round allow appendices or supplementary uploads?>
Info
Category Soft Skills
Name eurosys-supplementary
Version v20260724
Size 5.69KB
Updated At 2026-07-28
Language