Skills Soft Skills Structuring Papers: Body Versus Supplementary Artifacts

Structuring Papers: Body Versus Supplementary Artifacts

v20260724
socc-supplementary
A comprehensive guide for authors submitting technical papers to top-tier conferences, detailing how to effectively partition content between the main paper body and supplementary artifacts. It emphasizes the critical rule that all decision-making evidence (e.g., headline results, key performance metrics) must reside within the limited page budget of the main submission, ensuring the work is judgeable even without accessing raw data.
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Overview

SoCC Supplementary

Use this when assembling SoCC supplementary material. The governing rule is simple and strict: the paper must be judgeable from the reviewed pages alone. The released artifact and any appendix support the paper; they do not hold the argument. Reviewers read the artifact at their discretion, so anything the decision depends on — the headline throughput, tail, and cost results — lives in the body.

What goes where

Content Body (within page budget) Artifact / appendix
The cloud problem and the contribution Yes
Core mechanism or measurement design Yes Full config grids, extra parameters
Headline throughput / tail / cost results Yes Full result tables, secondary regimes
The key baseline comparison The result + baseline named and tuned The full sweep and raw logs
Testbed / trace description Summary + key parameters The complete node list, full trace spec
Raw logs, workload generators, replay scripts Yes
Reproduction instructions A pointer The README and run scripts

If a reviewer would need to open the artifact to know whether to accept — for instance to find the p99 or the cost breakdown — the paper is mis-partitioned; move that evidence into the body.

The page-budget discipline

SoCC's acmart budget (full: 12 pages of text and figures; short: 6 pages), with unlimited references, counts figures, tables, and any in-paper appendix. Consequences:

  • Keep the tail and cost results and the primary baseline comparison in the body — they are decision-critical at a cloud venue.
  • Long configuration sweeps, per-node breakdowns, and additional workload regimes go to the artifact with explicit forward references.
  • The unlimited-reference allowance is for the bibliography only; it does not let body text or decision-critical figures escape the 12/6-page limit.
  • Do not use the artifact to smuggle in a result that would not fit — an argument that only closes with material outside the reviewed pages reads as unreviewable.

Dual-anonymous supplementary rules

[No identity]   no authors, affiliations, acknowledgements, grants, cluster names, provider hints,
                or repository owners anywhere in the archive or appendix
[Anonymized links] the availability link points at an anonymizing host, not a personal/corporate repo
[Scrubbed traces]  released traces carry no identifying provenance (org name, internal IDs)
[Clean archive]  no .git history, .DS_Store, credentials, caches, or large irrelevant files
[Opens clean]    verify the archive unpacks and the README orients a reader in one minute on a
                fresh machine

Appendix architecture (when the template allows in-paper appendices)

  • Order appendix sections to mirror the result order; reviewers navigate by claim, not page number.
  • Keep each appendix section referenced from the body at least once — orphaned material is invisible under discretionary review.
  • Confirm on the current call whether in-paper appendices count against the 12/6-page budget; this varies and changes the split.

Vignette: splitting a cloud-systems measurement paper

A paper measuring a scheduler on a replayed trace: the body keeps the problem, the mechanism, the headline throughput/p99/cost results with tuned baselines, the key trade-off figure, and a limitations paragraph; the artifact holds the replay harness, the (anonymized) trace, the full config sweep, the per-node logs, and the analysis scripts. Nothing decision-critical lives only in the artifact, because artifact inspection is discretionary and the reviewers judge from the pages.

Output format

[Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready
[Partition check] anything decision-critical (tail/cost/baseline) outside the body? <none / move: what>
[Page budget] body within 12/6 pages? references-only unlimited allowance respected? yes/no
[Anonymity] archive + traces clean of identity + metadata? passed/issues
[Body dependency] <what a reviewer can decide without opening the artifact>
Info
Category Soft Skills
Name socc-supplementary
Version v20260724
Size 4.47KB
Updated At 2026-07-29
Language