CIKM Related Work

Related work at CIKM is a three-front obligation. A submission claiming the IR-mining-KM boundary must show command of each literature it borrows from, plus the smaller literature that lives on the boundary — much of which is CIKM's own back catalog. A section citing only one lane tells two-thirds of the reviewer pool that their field's relevant results may be unknown to the authors.

Three-front coverage plan

Front	Lineage to command	What its reviewer checks
Retrieval	Ranking models, neural matching (DRMM-line), evaluation practice	Is the nearest ranking method compared or distinguished?
Mining	Representation learning (GraRep-line), graph/sequence models, scale methods	Is the mechanism's delta over the nearest mining method stated?
KM / databases	Entity linking (TAGME-line), integration, KG construction and quality	Is the data-management cost and lineage acknowledged?

The verified exemplars in ../../resources/exemplars/library.md mark where these lineages pass through CIKM itself; citing the venue's own milestones — DSSM for click-supervised semantic matching, RippleNet/BERT4Rec for KG- and transformer-based recommendation — signals to the panel that the authors know whose house they are submitting to.

The boundary-work paragraph

After the three lane surveys, CIKM related-work sections need one paragraph the single-lane venues do not: the works that already tried to combine the same lanes. Structure it as three sentences — who combined what ("X fused KG signals into ranking..."), what they could not do ("...but only for static graphs at million-triple scale"), what this paper changes at the seam ("we make the fusion incremental, which is what deployment requires"). Reviewers use exactly this paragraph to locate the contribution; write it so it can be quoted in a meta-review.

Misattribution guard

CIKM sits so close to its siblings that venue misattribution is a live review risk — and a credibility hit when a reviewer authored the misplaced paper. Checked traps (dblp-verified, 2026-07-08):

• DeepWalk, node2vec, metapath2vec → KDD, not CIKM; CIKM's graph-embedding milestone is GraRep (CIKM 2015).
• SASRec → ICDM 2018; the transformer-recommender at CIKM is BERT4Rec (CIKM 2019).
• NGCF and LightGCN → SIGIR (2019/2020); CIKM's KG-recommendation landmark is RippleNet (CIKM 2018).
• Conv-KNRM → WSDM 2018, while DRMM → CIKM 2016; the neural-IR lineage hops venues paper by paper.
• TransE → NeurIPS 2013 — KG-embedding origins are not CIKM even though KG applications are core CIKM territory.

Rule: before writing "(CIKM 20xx)", confirm on dblp's conf/cikm index; before writing "prior CIKM work has not...", search the last three CIKM proceedings in the ACM DL — with many hundreds of papers per recent edition, the prior work usually exists.

Recency expectations by front

The three fronts age at different speeds, and reviewers calibrate accordingly. A workable recency floor when drafting:

Front	Staleness signal reviewers flag	Floor
Neural retrieval / RAG-adjacent	No baseline or citation from the last ~18 months	Current-year and previous-year venue papers present
Graph/sequence mining	Comparing only against pre-transformer-era methods	At least one recent strong method compared, not just cited
KM / KG construction	Ignoring the current ecosystem (modern KG tooling, LLM-assisted curation)	Ecosystem named, position stated
Foundations	—	Foundational citations never go stale; DSSM-era work still anchors lineages

Recency is about baselines even more than bibliography: citing a recent method while comparing only against old ones is the version of staleness that costs scores (cikm-experiments owns that half of the problem).

Citation hygiene mechanics

• Cite the published venue version once it exists — the CIKM/SIGIR/KDD record, not the arXiv preprint the PDF happened to be downloaded from. dblp resolves this in seconds and the ACM reference format carries the DOI.
• Keep bibliography entries consistent in format; a references section mixing five citation styles reads as assembled-by-paste, and at CIKM the references are uncounted — there is no budget excuse for truncated entries.
• When a line of work spans venues (the neural-matching lineage deliberately does), cite the actual hops rather than attributing the whole line to one venue — the misattribution guard above exists because reviewers notice.

Preprints, concurrency, and the declaration rule

CIKM 2026 bans concurrent submission outright and requires declaring any public non-anonymized version on the EasyChair form (cikm-submission). In the related-work text itself: cite your own preprint in third person like a stranger's work; cite independent concurrent arXiv work neutrally with a technical contrast and no priority argument; and never let a citation resolve the authors' identity (e.g., a footnoted repository URL owned by an author).

Auditing the novelty sentence

The contribution statement should survive this adversarial read: for each clause, name the closest prior work that could claim the same clause, and state the surviving difference in mechanism terms, not adjective terms.

Draft: "We are the first to use knowledge graphs for enterprise search."

Audit: KG-for-search has a decade of work (the RippleNet-line alone applies KG propagation to ranking-adjacent tasks); "first" fails on contact. Repaired: "Prior KG-augmented retrieval assumes a static graph resolved at index time; we resolve links at query time against a continuously edited graph, which no prior system in this line supports." The repaired sentence names the lineage, concedes its existence, and stakes a mechanism-level difference a reviewer can verify rather than a primacy claim they can falsify with one citation — the only kind of novelty sentence that is safe in front of a pool this broad.

Output format

[Front coverage] retrieval / mining / KM-DB — each surveyed with nearest work named
[Boundary paragraph] <who-combined-what → gap → this paper's seam move>
[CIKM back-catalog] <own-venue milestones cited where they exist>
[Misattribution scan] <every "(CIKM 20xx)" dblp-checked; sibling classics placed right>
[Declaration state] <own preprints third-person, form declaration consistent>