Agent skill

Sigmod Topic Selection

by brycewang-stanford in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

A skill your agent uses when judging whether a project belongs at SIGMOD's research track, comparing it against PVLDB's rolling model, ICDE, PODS, KDD, CIDR, and TODS, weighing the industrial track…

MITAuto-check passed

Install Sigmod Topic Selection

skills CLI
$ npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill sigmod-topic-selection -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills sigmod-topic-selection --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/SIGMOD-Skills/skills/sigmod-topic-selection .claude/skills/sigmod-topic-selection && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
sigmod-topic-selection
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.5k tokens
SKILL.md length
680 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
2,387
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

A skill your agent uses when judging whether a project belongs at SIGMOD's research track, comparing it against PVLDB's rolling model, ICDE, PODS, KDD, CIDR, and TODS, weighing the industrial track…

  • Judging whether a project belongs at SIGMODs research track
  • SKILL.md covers The core fit question, Neighbor-venue decision table, SIGMOD vs. PVLDB: same field,… and Research vs. industrial track, plus 4 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md
  • Comparing it against PVLDBs rolling model

What it does

Sigmod Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when judging whether a project belongs at SIGMOD's research track, comparing it against PVLDB's rolling model, ICDE, PODS, KDD, CIDR, and TODS, weighing the industrial track for deployment papers, and testing whether the contribution is genuinely a data-management result rather than an application that touches data.

Its SKILL.md is about 1.5k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

The repository describes itself as: Journal-specific Claude Code/Codex skill packs covering mainstream journals — AER, QJE, Nature, Cell, 管理世界, 经济研究 & 200+ more — your fast track to getting published. | 覆盖主流期刊的… The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Judging whether a project belongs at SIGMODs research track
  • Comparing it against PVLDBs rolling model
  • Weighing the industrial track for deployment papers
  • Testing whether the contribution is genuinely a data-management result rather than an application that touches data

Example prompts

  • “s research track, comparing it against PVLDB”
  • “/sigmod-topic-selection”

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 932eb23. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Sigmod Topic Selection loads about 1.5k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 86 tokens; SKILL.md has 680 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~86
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.5k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills at commit 932eb23, republished under its MIT licence (© brycewang-stanford). 680 words, ~1,455 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/sigmod-topic-selection/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
sigmod-topic-selection
description
Use when judging whether a project belongs at SIGMOD's research track, comparing it against PVLDB's rolling model, ICDE, PODS, KDD, CIDR, and TODS, weighing the industrial track for deployment papers, and testing whether the contribution is genuinely a data-management result rather than an application that touches data.

SIGMOD Topic Selection

SIGMOD's research track wants contributions to data management — storage, query processing, transactions, data integration, systems for and with ML, data engineering at scale — where the advance would matter to someone building or theorizing a data system. The commonest misroute is the application paper that uses databases heavily but advances only its application. Run the fit test before any writing investment.

The core fit question

State the contribution in one sentence and inspect the direct object. "We make query optimization better under X" is SIGMOD-shaped. "We make fraud detection better using a database" is not, unless the fraud workload forced a reusable data-management technique — in which case that technique is the paper.

Neighbor-venue decision table

Signal in the projectBetter homeWhy
Data-management advance, evaluation ready nowSIGMOD round or PVLDBPick by calendar and model, below
Formal semantics, complexity, lower boundsPODSCo-located theory sibling with its own PC
Mining/ML method where data infra is incidentalKDD or an ML venueSIGMOD PCs route these out fast
Provocative architecture vision, thin evaluationCIDREvidence bar differs by design
Deployed-system experience, lessons, scale war storiesSIGMOD industrial trackNeeds ≥1 non-academic author; separate CFP
Mature line needing definitive long-form treatmentTODSJournal pace; also invites best SIGMOD papers
Broad data-engineering result, DB framing weakICDESame community, different flagship

SIGMOD vs. PVLDB: same field, different machinery

The two flagships overlap almost completely in scope; the choice is mechanical, and worth making deliberately:

  • Cadence: SIGMOD batches quarterly rounds into PACMMOD issues; PVLDB accepts monthly on a rolling basis into the year's volume.
  • Failure cost: a SIGMOD rejection locks the track for 12 months; PVLDB's monthly gate makes retry geometry different — check its current resubmission rules rather than assuming symmetry.
  • Revision shape: both use journal-style revisions now; the calendars and letter mechanics differ by cycle.
  • Practical rule: with a result ready in week X, compute time-to-first- verdict at each venue's next gate and weigh it against where the work's nearest neighbors have been landing recently.

Research vs. industrial track

If the contribution's strength is that it runs in production — scale, operational lessons, design retrospectives of a shipped engine — the industrial track evaluates it on those terms, while the research track would demand novelty the deployment story may not carry. Requirements differ (non-academic co-author, separate deadline calendar, own PC), and the SIGMOD 2027 industrial CFP was not yet posted as of 2026-07-08 — verify before planning around it.

Show full SKILL.md (274 more words)Show less

Fit-sharpening moves

  • Name the data-management primitive touched: an index, an optimizer rule, a consistency protocol, a storage layout, a data-cleaning operator. No primitive, no research-track paper.
  • Check the current CFP's topics list; scope wording shifts by cycle, and ML-for-systems / systems-for-ML emphasis has been growing.
  • Probe generality: does the technique survive outside your prototype? A PC of engine builders will ask "would this help Postgres/RocksDB/ Spark," concretely.
  • Read the last two PACMMOD issues in your area; if nothing there shares your problem statement, either you found a gap or you found a fit problem — decide which with evidence.

Reading the venue's current appetite

Beyond the CFP's topic list, three observable signals calibrate fit:

  • Scan the most recent PACMMOD issue's table of contents: the distribution of storage vs. query vs. ML-adjacent vs. data-integration papers is the revealed preference of the current PC structure.
  • Award choices telegraph values — the Test-of-Time lineage (see resources/exemplars/library.md) consistently honors work that changed what systems do, not what benchmarks report.
  • Keynote and tutorial themes at the last edition mark where the community believes its frontier is; a paper swimming with that current gets read more generously than the CFP text alone predicts.
text
Quick probe: title your paper, then find five PACMMOD/PVLDB papers from
the last two years that would cite it. Cannot name five -> the fit
problem is upstream of the writing.

One project, routed three ways

A fictional team builds learned cardinality estimation into a production cloud optimizer. Three legitimate papers hide inside: the estimation technique with guarantees and controlled evaluation (SIGMOD research or PVLDB); the deployment retrospective with fleet-scale lessons (SIGMOD industrial); the formal analysis of when learned estimators can beat histograms (PODS). Shipping all three as one manuscript serves none of the three PCs — and PACMMOD's overlap rule means the split must be genuine, with disjoint results.

Output format

text
[Fit verdict] research track / industrial track / neighbor venue
[Primitive] the data-management object the paper advances
[One-sentence claim] with the direct object underlined
[Venue race] time-to-verdict SIGMOD round vs. PVLDB gate
[Split risk] salami-slicing vs. legitimate multi-paper plan
[Next step] write / re-scope / re-route, with rationale

© brycewang-stanford, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in SIGMOD-Skills/skills/sigmod-topic-selection of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

Sigmod Topic Selection next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Sigmod Topic Selection compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Sigmod Topic Selection this skillbrycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills1.2k—~1.5kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
JudgeNeoLabHQ/context-engineering-kit1.7k—~2kAutomated safety check: PassGPL-3.0
Do And JudgeNeoLabHQ/context-engineering-kit1.7k—~14kAutomated safety check: PassGPL-3.0
TopicsZimoLiao/scholaraio576—~294Automated safety check: PassMIT
Topic Modelingbrycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills4.5k—~3.7kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence
Bestblogs Topicginobefun/BestBlogs4k—~670Automated safety check: PassNone

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Questions about Sigmod Topic Selection

What does Sigmod Topic Selection do?

A skill your agent uses when judging whether a project belongs at SIGMOD's research track, comparing it against PVLDB's rolling model, ICDE, PODS, KDD, CIDR, and TODS, weighing the industrial track…. Sigmod Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when judging whether a project belongs at SIGMOD's research track, comparing it against PVLDB's rolling model, ICDE, PODS, KDD, CIDR, and TODS, weighing the industrial track for deployment papers, and testing whether the contribution is genuinely a data-management result rather than an application that touches data.

When should I use Sigmod Topic Selection?

Sigmod Topic Selection fits situations like: judging whether a project belongs at SIGMODs research track; comparing it against PVLDBs rolling model; weighing the industrial track for deployment papers; testing whether the contribution is genuinely a data-management result rather than an application that touches data.

How do I install Sigmod Topic Selection in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill sigmod-topic-selection -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (SIGMOD-Skills/skills/sigmod-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .claude/skills/sigmod-topic-selection in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Sigmod Topic Selection in Codex?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill sigmod-topic-selection -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (SIGMOD-Skills/skills/sigmod-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .agents/skills/sigmod-topic-selection in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Sigmod Topic Selection in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill sigmod-topic-selection -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/sigmod-topic-selection, .gemini/skills/sigmod-topic-selection, .github/skills/sigmod-topic-selection and .opencode/skills/sigmod-topic-selection in your project.

What does Sigmod Topic Selection need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Sigmod Topic Selection is instructions for the agent only.

Does Sigmod Topic Selection access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Sigmod Topic Selection safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Sigmod Topic Selection use?

Sigmod Topic Selection is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Sigmod Topic Selection use?

About 1.5k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 5.8k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Sigmod Topic Selection?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Sigmod Topic Selection: Judge (NeoLabHQ/context-engineering-kit, 1.7k stars), Do And Judge (NeoLabHQ/context-engineering-kit, 1.7k stars), Topics (ZimoLiao/scholaraio, 576 stars) and Topic Modeling (brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills, 4.5k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Sigmod Topic Selection?

brycewang-stanford (a GitHub user) maintains it in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, which has 1,219 GitHub stars. The repository holds 2,387 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on September 27, 2026.

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.