ACM SIGMOD Record

About ACM SIGMOD Record

Overview

ACM SIGMOD Record is the quarterly publication of the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD), published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in New York, USA. It carries the print ISSN 0163-5808 and the online ISSN 1943-5835, and its web edition is freely available online at sigmodrecord.org. The Record is the principal periodical of the world's largest and most influential database research community, complementing the annual SIGMOD and PODS conferences with surveys, vision articles, research highlights, columns, and community news.

Unlike a conventional archival journal, SIGMOD Record blends several genres: peer-reviewed-style survey and vision articles, editorially curated columns (research highlights, systems and prototypes, database principles, research centers, distinguished profiles, reminiscences on influential papers, industry perspectives), and official SIGMOD announcements including conference calls and election information. This mix makes it both a citable research venue and the community's bulletin board — a combination that has sustained it for nearly five decades.

The publication is distributed in print to SIGMOD members and electronically through the ACM Digital Library and its own freely accessible website, giving its contents unusually wide reach for a special-interest publication.

Aims and Scope

According to its official description, SIGMOD Record is a quarterly publication of ACM SIGMOD dedicated to the study, development, and application of database technology, and its web edition is freely available online. In practice, the Record's scope covers the full breadth of data management research and practice:

• Research articles and surveys — overviews of active research areas, written to be accessible to the broader database community.
• Vision articles — forward-looking pieces on where data management is heading.
• Research highlights — concise presentations of notable recent results.
• Systems and prototypes — descriptions of implemented database systems and research prototypes.
• Database principles — theoretical foundations of data management.
• Research centers — profiles of database research groups and laboratories around the world.
• Distinguished profiles — interviews and profiles of prominent figures in the database field.
• Reminiscences on influential papers — retrospective accounts of landmark publications.
• Industry perspectives and reports — views from industrial database practice.
• Advice columns — including guidance aimed at mid-career researchers.
• SIGMOD announcements — conference calls, election notices, and organizational news; in most cases, announcements and calls for papers are limited to about one page.

The Record solicits contributions from the community: calls for articles, reports, and proposals for special sections appear regularly, and detailed submission information is published on the editorial policy site and the authors' page.

History and Background

SIGMOD Record's history is inseparable from the history of the database field itself. SIGMOD was founded in 1976, evolving out of SIGFIDET (the Special Interest Group on File Description and Translation). FIDET began in January 1969 as a Special Interest Committee started by Diane and John Smith, James Rothnie, and others, became a SIG in September 1970, and in 1974 renamed itself SIGMOD — the Special Interest Group on Management of Data — with Bernard Plagman continuing as chair.

The newsletter was renamed SIGMOD Record and its first volume was numbered volume 9, appearing in 1977 — the numbering continued from the FIDET/FDT publication series, whose volumes (including the SIGFIDET workshops of 1970–1974 and FDT volumes 1–8) are preserved in the SIGMOD Anthology. The original mission of the group was the "taxonomics of data and store structures; data independence; data description languages; description for large databases and networks; and description for efficiency of storage use."

Milestones alongside the Record's run include the start of the SIGMOD Conference in 1975 in San Jose (first program chair Frank King) and the PODS Conference in 1982 in Los Angeles (first program chair Alfred V. Aho); the two conferences became co-located in 1991 in Denver to encourage interaction between the theory and systems communities. Three Turing laureates — Charles W. Bachman (1973), Edgar F. Codd (1981), and Jim Gray (1998) — contributed foundationally to database research chronicled in the Record's pages.

Early issues of the Record carried a note that papers printed were unrefereed working papers unless otherwise noted — a reminder of its origins as a community newsletter. Over the decades it evolved into its current form with a formal editorial board, stated editorial policy, and electronic submission, while retaining its community-service character.

Editorial Leadership

SIGMOD Record is led by an Editor-in-Chief supported by a team of associate editors responsible for individual columns. According to the journal's official back-cover masthead, Rada Chirkova of North Carolina State University served as Editor-in-Chief (as listed in the December 2019 issue's official publication information). An earlier masthead (2006) listed Ling Liu of Georgia Tech as Editor. (Editorial appointments rotate; readers should check the current masthead at sigmodrecord.org.)

The associate editor team, per the official masthead, has included column editors such as Azza Abouzied (research and vision columns), Lyublena Antova (industry perspectives and reports), Vanessa Braganholo (distinguished profiles), Aaron J. Elmore (research and vision columns), Wim Martens and Divesh Srivastava and Kenneth Ross and Samuel Madden and Alfons Kemper (research highlights, at various times), Kyriakos Mouratidis (research centers), Dan Olteanu (database principles), Pinar Tozun (research surveys), Immanuel Trummer (research columns), Yannis Velegrakis (systems and prototypes), Marianne Winslett (distinguished profiles), Jun Yang (vision articles and research highlights), Wook-Shin Han (research and vision columns), and Tamer Ozsu (advice to mid-career researchers). This column structure — each section with a dedicated expert editor — is distinctive to the Record and explains its breadth.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

SIGMOD Record operates an editorial process suited to its mixed content. Full-length articles and surveys are submitted electronically in PDF format through the journal's Manuscript Central site (mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sigmodrecord), and a detailed editorial policy is published online at sigmodrecord.org/sigmodrecordeditorialpolicy, with author guidance at sigmodrecord.org/authors. Column editors manage the review and selection of contributions to their sections.

Because the Record is a community publication rather than a conventional archival journal, its review model is lighter than that of ACM Transactions: contributions are editorially curated and reviewed by column editors and the editor-in-chief, with emphasis on clarity, interest to the community, and accuracy, rather than the multi-round anonymous peer review of archival venues. Authors should consult the current editorial policy for the expectations applying to each article type.

Indexing and Abstracting

SIGMOD Record is indexed in DBLP, the computer science bibliography, which records its volumes and articles. The publication is also distributed through the ACM Digital Library. Its subject coverage falls under Computer Science, Information Systems and Computer Science, Software Engineering. Authors and readers should note that as a newsletter-format community publication, its indexing footprint is narrower than that of ACM's archival Transactions journals; its influence flows more through community readership than citation databases.

Impact Metrics

Bibliometric data for SIGMOD Record should be read with the caveat that it is a community newsletter/magazine rather than an archival journal:

• Impact Factor: a Chinese university library journal guide (Wuhan University) lists an impact factor of 0.775 for SIGMOD Record under the categories Computer Science, Information Systems and Computer Science, Software Engineering. This is a secondary-source figure and should be treated as indicative only.
• Citation influence: despite its newsletter status, Record articles are cited in the research literature — DBLP records its articles, and survey and vision pieces in the Record regularly accumulate citations.

For formal research evaluation, authors typically weigh the Record's community visibility and speed of dissemination against the higher citation prestige of archival journals and top conferences.

Publication Ethics and Copyright

The Record's author agreement, published on its official site, states the copyright terms plainly: by submitting an article for publication, authors grant ACM a nonexclusive, perpetual, worldwide right to publish the article, to digitize and distribute it in the ACM Digital Library and related services, and to include it in print and electronic versions of the publication, subject to acceptance by the editor. Authors retain the right to post their own versions under the specified conditions.

Opinions expressed in articles and letters are those of the authors and do not necessarily express the opinions of ACM or SIGMOD; authors should be contacted for reprint authorization. Standard scholarly ethics apply: submissions should be original, properly attributed, and not under concurrent consideration elsewhere as archival publications.

Open Access Policy

The web edition of SIGMOD Record is freely available online at sigmodrecord.org, per its official description — one of the publication's defining features and a major reason for its broad readership. Print distribution to members continues alongside the free electronic edition. Because the content is freely readable without subscription, authors gain wide visibility, and the publication functions as an open channel for community communication. Authors should confirm current posting and reuse rights on the journal's authors' page.

Submission Guidelines

The Record actively solicits contributions: articles, reports, and proposals for special sections. Papers are submitted electronically in PDF format through Manuscript Central (mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sigmodrecord). Detailed submission information, including the editorial policy and author instructions, is available at sigmodrecord.org/sigmodrecordeditorialpolicy and sigmodrecord.org/authors. Announcements and calls for papers are in most cases limited to about one page. Prospective contributors should identify the appropriate column for their piece (survey, vision, research highlight, systems/prototype, profile, report) and may contact the relevant column editor in advance.

Readership and Audience

SIGMOD Record's readers are the database community itself: researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in data management, as well as the broader computer science audience interested in where the field is going. Because the web edition is free, its readership extends well beyond ACM/SIGMOD membership — including industry engineers, students in developing regions, and researchers in adjacent fields. For a doctoral student entering database research, a year of Record issues is one of the fastest ways to learn the field's people, problems, and directions.

Key Facts

• Full title: ACM SIGMOD Record
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Special Interest Group on Management of Data — New York, USA
• Print ISSN: 0163-5808
• Online ISSN: 1943-5835
• Frequency: Quarterly
• First volume as SIGMOD Record: Volume 9, 1977 (continuing the SIGFIDET/FDT series)
• Editor-in-Chief: Rada Chirkova, North Carolina State University (per the official December 2019 masthead; verify current masthead at sigmodrecord.org)
• Access: Web edition freely available online; print for members
• Submission: mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sigmodrecord
• Official site: sigmodrecord.org

Anatomy of a Typical Issue

A recent issue of SIGMOD Record illustrates the publication's structure. The front matter carries the masthead — Editor-in-Chief, associate editors with their column assignments, and the official publication statement (ISSN 0163-5808, quarterly, ACM address). The body typically opens with research and vision articles: longer pieces, often invited, that survey an area or argue a direction. These are followed by the columns: research highlights (short, sharp presentations of notable results), systems and prototypes (implemented systems), database principles (theory), research centers (lab profiles), and the community columns — distinguished profiles, reminiscences on influential papers, industry perspectives, and advice pieces.

The back of the issue carries SIGMOD announcements: calls for papers for upcoming conferences, election slates and candidate statements, and organizational news. Because announcements are typically limited to about a page, the issue remains dominated by substantive content. The mix means a single issue can take a reader from a vision of the field's future, through concrete systems being built today, to the practical business of the community's conferences and governance.

Columns in Detail

The column system is the Record's signature organizational device, and each column has a distinct editorial character:

• Research Highlights — curated presentations of significant recent results, edited by specialists who select work of broad interest and present it accessibly.
• Systems and Prototypes — descriptions of database systems actually built, emphasizing architecture, implementation lessons, and demonstrated capabilities.
• Database Principles — the theoretical core: query languages, complexity, logic, and foundations, presented for a general database audience.
• Research Centers — profiles of laboratories and groups worldwide, useful for students choosing where to apply and for the community to track emerging centers of activity.
• Distinguished Profiles — interviews and career retrospectives with senior figures, preserving the field's oral history.
• Reminiscences on Influential Papers — authors revisit landmark publications, explaining the context, the reception, and what they would do differently — a rare genre that teaches how influential research actually happens.
• Industry Perspectives and Reports — how database technology is built, deployed, and operated in industry, bridging the academic-industrial divide.
• Advice to Mid-Career Researchers — career guidance for faculty past the tenure hurdle, a demographic often underserved by mentoring literature.

The Anthology, DiSC, and Digital Preservation

SIGMOD's commitment to preserving its literature extends beyond the Record itself. The SIGMOD Anthology collects the community's historical publications — including the SIGFIDET workshops of 1970–1974 and the FDT volumes that preceded the Record — making the field's formative literature accessible. SIGMOD DiSC (Digital Symposium Collection) and SIGMOD Online are companion digital-library efforts. Together with the freely available web edition of the Record, these resources mean that a student today can trace database research continuously from the late 1960s to the present without paywall barriers for the community's own publications — an unusually complete open record for a computer science subfield.

The Record's Role Beside the Conferences

The database field, like much of computer science, publishes its most selective results at conferences — principally SIGMOD and PODS (with VLDB as the other major venue). The Record does not compete with this model; it complements it. Conferences deliver depth-first technical results under tight page limits and rapid cycles. The Record delivers breadth: surveys that map an area, visions that propose directions, retrospectives that explain how results came to be, and profiles that introduce the people. A researcher who reads only conference proceedings knows the field's results; a researcher who also reads the Record knows the field.

The relationship is also practical: conference calls, program committee lists, and organizational decisions appear in the Record, making it the community's official channel. Election candidate statements — such as those published for SIGMOD officer elections — let the membership evaluate candidates' platforms, a small but real element of the group's democratic governance.

For Prospective Authors: What Gets Published

The Record's editors look for contributions that serve the community: surveys that genuinely organize a literature rather than merely listing it; vision pieces with concrete technical content behind the speculation; system descriptions honest about limitations as well as achievements; retrospectives with insight that only the participants could provide; and reports from industry or from emerging research centers that the community would otherwise not hear about. Writing for the Record differs from writing a conference paper: the audience is the whole community rather than a program committee, accessibility matters more than density, and the piece should still be worth reading in five years. Authors uncertain about fit are encouraged to contact the relevant column editor before writing — the masthead lists editors by column precisely to enable this.

Bibliographic and Citation Details

Cite the publication as ACM SIGMOD Record (abbreviated SIGMOD Rec.), ISSN 0163-5808 (print) / 1943-5835 (online), published quarterly by the Association for Computing Machinery, New York. Record articles carry DOIs through the ACM Digital Library (e.g., the 10.1145 prefix series), and the publication is recorded in DBLP. Because the web edition is freely available, citations to Record articles are resolvable by any reader without subscription — a practical advantage when citing surveys and vision pieces in work aimed at a broad audience.