About the conference
SIGIR is the home of information retrieval: search ranking, evaluation methodology, recommendation, conversational search, and — front and center in the LLM era — retrieval-augmented generation. IR’s rigorous evaluation culture (test collections, significance testing) sets the reviewing tone.
Full papers are typically due in late January or February for the July conference. The evaluation bar is the distinctive hurdle: reviewers expect standard collections or well-justified new ones, and statistical significance over strong baselines.