Mentoring for Conference Paper Submissions

The ACM Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR) offers a mentoring program for papers being submitted to the ACM SIGIR 2007 conference. If you would like help with your submission, you may ask for a mentor: a person who will help you with your submission to the SIGIR audience through one-on-one advising, usually via e-mail. A mentor can also familiarize you with the standards and deadlines of SIGIR submissions. Mentors are volunteers familiar with successful submissions.

Mentors are primarily available for full papers. To request a mentor, please send email to Mark Sanderson at by the deadline for mentoring requests, November 15, 2006.

Please include:

• Your name and the names of your co-authors.
• The name of your school (or department) and institution.
• A plain-text description of your work (a title and abstract is a minimum requirement).
• Any specific questions or areas in which you would like help.
• But don't include your draft paper.

Reasonable expectations for a mentor include giving advice as to the most appropriate forum for your work, suggesting improvements to your submission, suggesting how to deal with language problems, or referring you to relevant research of which you might not have been aware. Typically, a mentor might spend 3-7 hours on a submission. We carefully match mentors to mentees, and wish to support you in developing your work into a high-quality submission with a good chance of being accepted and published.

Note the following:

• People requesting mentoring must have a complete submission ready for the mentor to review by the due date (November 15).
• If there is an experienced IR researcher in your department, a request for mentoring may be declined.
• No announcements of mentor/mentee assignments will be made until after the deadline.
• Reviewers will not be informed of whether a paper has been mentored. That is, the fact that a paper was mentored is not considered during the paper selection process.