Getting your acceptance rate to 80%: a checklist for publishing

Abstract

SIGMOD acceptance rates have generally been in the narrow range of between 14 to 18 percent during the past decade. However, for given individuals the range is much wider. Some people have a zero percent acceptance rate, after five or six frustratingly unsuccessful attempts they set their sights lower (or, more pessimistically, they fail to get tenure and stop trying). Many people have acceptance rates that reflect the SIGMOD average of about 20%. Are there people that have perfect acceptance rates? In this talk I argue that while a perfect acceptance rate is essentially impossible to achieve year after year, an 80% acceptance rate is possible for top conferences. I will show how ten simple "tricks" allow you to significantly increase your odds of acceptance. As proof of utility I note that in the last ten years these ideas have allowed me to achieve 80%+ acceptance rates for many competitive conferences, including ICDM (22 papers), SIGKDD (19 papers), SDM (16 papers), VLDB (6) papers etc.