cikm-topic-selection
Use when deciding whether a project fits CIKM, the tri-community ACM venue spanning information retrieval, data mining, and knowledge management/databases, when weighing CIKM against SIGIR, KDD, WSDM, TheWebConf, SIGMOD/VLDB, or ISWC, and when choosing among CIKM's five tracks before writing begins.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill cikm-topic-selection --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# CIKM Topic Selection CIKM is the room where three communities meet: information retrieval, data mining, and knowledge management with its database roots. Its sponsorship tells the story — ACM SIGIR (since 1993) plus SIGWEB (since 2006) — and its 2026 self-description spans information access, knowledge representation, data integration, and personalization (source map, checked 2026-07-08). Fit questions here are therefore different from single-community venues: the issue is rarely "is this in scope" and usually "is the breadth an advantage for this particular paper." ## The tri-community fit question Ask which communities the paper genuinely speaks to, then count: - **Two or three lanes** — a retrieval model built on a knowledge graph, a mining method whose output feeds a search or QA system, an entity-resolution pipeline with both database and IR evaluation. This is the CIKM sweet spot: the blended reviewer pool is an asset, because no single-community venue gives all lanes credit. - **Exactly one lane, done deeply** — pure ranking-model work, pure pattern-mining theory, pure query optimization. CIKM accepts such papers, but the specialist venue (SIGIR, KDD, SIGMOD/VLDB) usually
- The tri-community fit question
- Honest calendar positioning
- Sibling contrast table
- Five-track fork (2026 lineup)
- Decision walk-through
- Scope vocabulary sanity check
- Prestige and career honesty
- Timing as a tiebreaker
- Output format
What does the cikm-topic-selection skill do?
Use when deciding whether a project fits CIKM, the tri-community ACM venue spanning information retrieval, data mining, and knowledge management/databases, when weighing CIKM against SIGIR, KDD, WSDM, TheWebConf, SIGMOD/VLDB, or ISWC, and when choosing among CIKM's five tracks before writing begins.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill cikm-topic-selection --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.