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pods-topic-selection

Use when deciding whether a data-management project belongs at ACM PODS (the database-theory symposium) or should be routed to SIGMOD/VLDB/ICDE (systems), ICDT (its sister theory venue), LICS/ICALP/STOC (pure theory), or a journal (TODS/LMCS/JACM), by contribution shape, the result-swap test, and the PODS-vs-ICDT community fit.

PODS-Skills/skills/pods-topic-selection/SKILL.md

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# PODS Topic Selection

Decide the venue before drafting. **PODS** — the ACM SIGMOD/SIGACT Symposium on **Principles of
Database Systems** — is the theoretical-foundations symposium held jointly with SIGMOD each year. Its
papers are **theorems about data management**: models, query languages, complexity bounds,
dichotomies, logic, and provably optimal algorithms. A technically strong paper whose real
contribution is a faster system, a benchmark win, or an engineering artifact is respected and then
rejected as out of scope — that paper is SIGMOD/VLDB/ICDE. PODS reviewers read for a **provable,
foundational** statement about a cleanly defined model.

## The routing question that matters most

The decisive question is rarely "is this about databases?" but **"is the contribution a theorem or a
system?"** If the headline is a bound, a dichotomy, a semantics, an expressiveness result, or an