sigir-writing-style
Use when drafting or revising prose for a SIGIR paper — the IR register that leads with task, collection, and metric; claim sentences calibrated to significance results; first-page architecture for retrieval contributions; table-centric argumentation; and compressing into the 9-page budget without cutting soundness.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill sigir-writing-style --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.
# SIGIR Writing Style SIGIR prose has a recognizable register: it names the retrieval task before the model, quantifies on named collections with named metrics, and calibrates every adjective to a statistical test. Papers written in general-ML register ("we achieve state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks") read as tourists. This skill converts drafts into the native register. ## The first-page arc for a retrieval paper Reviewers form the accept/reject prior on page one. The arc that works: 1. **Task + regime**: which retrieval problem, under which constraints (first-stage vs re-ranking, latency budget, corpus scale, low-resource language, ...). 2. **The specific failure of current practice**: not "existing methods have limitations" but "late-interaction models pay a storage cost that grows with document length" — a mechanism, not a mood. 3. **The move**: your method/finding in one sentence, mechanism visible. 4. **Calibrated evidence preview**: collections, headline metric deltas, and the significance qualifier, all in one breath. 5. **Contribution bullets** that are checkable promises ("a re-ranking model that ...; an analysis showing ...; run files and code at ..."
- The first-page arc for a retrieval paper
- Vocabulary calibration
- Tables carry the argument
- Sectioning that survives the 9-page budget
- Sentence-level habits of accepted IR papers
- Abstract length and shape
- Revision protocol
- Output format
What does the sigir-writing-style skill do?
Use when drafting or revising prose for a SIGIR paper — the IR register that leads with task, collection, and metric; claim sentences calibrated to significance results; first-page architecture for retrieval contributions; table-centric argumentation; and compressing into the 9-page budget without cutting soundness.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill sigir-writing-style --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.