Position the paper so its claim's novelty is checkable. At a selective single-track venue, related work is not a courtesy section — it is where the Area Chair verifies that the field genuinely lacks what the paper asserts.
| Lane | Where it lives | The question your coverage must answer |
|---|---|---|
| RSS's own line | roboticsproceedings.org (free) / dblp | What did the last 2-3 editions say on this problem? |
| The IEEE siblings | ICRA / IROS proceedings | Is this "known at the mega-conferences" already? |
| Robot learning | CoRL, ML venues | If learning-based: what does the CoRL line already show? |
| Journal depth | T-RO, IJRR, AURO | Does a journal version of this idea predate you? |
| Enabling fields | vision/ML/control theory venues | Is the core mechanism imported? Say so and cite the source |
The venue's own lane deserves priority: RSS proceedings are open-access, so "we couldn't access it" is never a defense, and reviewers often are the recent-edition authors under the anonymity veil.
Rewrite tour-style paragraphs into claim-anchored contrasts:
One contrast sentence per nearest neighbor; the neighbor set is usually 3-5 papers, not 30. Everything else earns at most a grouped citation.
Robot learning moves preprint-first, so the January deadline lands amid unrefereed neighbors:
A repeatable sweep that catches the misses reviewers catch:
1. roboticsproceedings.org: open the last three volumes' tables of contents;
keyword-scan titles (all free, no login).
2. dblp.org/db/conf/rss: confirm venue attribution for anything you plan to
call "prior RSS work" — folklore misfiles ICRA papers as RSS constantly.
3. dblp author pages of your 3-5 nearest neighbors: find their newest
follow-ups, including the IROS/CoRL versions of ideas you know from RSS.
4. arXiv: search your claim's key nouns filtered to the last 12 months;
list hits in a concurrency ledger with a one-line distinction each.
5. Reverse pass: for each baseline you compare against, read who cites it
*this year* — that citation neighborhood is your reviewer pool's memory.
| Failure | How it reads to the AC |
|---|---|
| Only ML venues cited for a manipulation claim | Authors don't know the robotics line |
| The venue's own recent papers absent | Didn't check the free proceedings |
| Nearest neighbor cited but never contrasted | The delta may not exist |
| "First to..." with a findable counterexample | Credibility damage spreads to the claims |
| 60-reference tour, 3 contrasts | Coverage substituting for positioning |
rss-workflow); resolve before, not after,
the abstract deadline.A paper claims contact-timing decoupling explains bimanual failure rates. Its neighbor set after the protocol sweep: a recent RSS paper on bimanual planning (contrast: couples timing and motion, cannot attribute failures), an ICRA system with higher raw success on one garment class (contrast: no mechanism isolation, so the number and the claim answer different questions), a CoRL policy-learning line (contrast: learns timing implicitly; this paper measures it explicitly), and a T-RO stability analysis (contrast: quasi-static assumption excludes the regime studied here). Four contrasts, four sentences, and the novelty claim is now checkable by any reviewer who knows one of the four lanes.
[Lane coverage] rss-line / icra-iros / corl / journals / enabling -> gaps
[Nearest neighbors] <3-5 papers, each with a contrast sentence>
[Concurrent preprints] <item -> neutral handling>
[Self-citation sweep] third-person ok / platform-chain risk found
[Overlap declarations] <none / listed>
[Novelty sentence] <the claim's delta, one line>