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Call for Doctoral Consortium papers

The ECIR 2021 Doctoral Consortium is an excellent forum for PhD students to discuss their research ideas with world-class researchers in the area of Information Retrieval.

We encourage submissions on theory, experimentation, and practice of retrieval, representation, management, and usage of textual, visual, audio, and multi-modal information. Students are also welcome to submit preliminary work seeking expert feedback and recommendation.

During the DC session, students’ presentations will be followed by discussions and individual meetings with senior researchers who are members of the DC Committee. One submission will be awarded the “best doctoral consortium paper award” by the DC Committee.

Prospective candidates for the Doctoral Consortium

Students who have recently completed their research proposal, or about to do so (typically 2nd year PhD students) are welcome to submit their contribution to the consortium. Students will be selected based on the potential of their research for future impact on the field of Information Retrieval and the likely benefit to the student of participating in the DC. Students will have the opportunity to engage in detailed discussion with advisors through individual sessions that will take place before the DC event and during the conference.

Submission Guidelines

The submission may contain previously-published material, as well as ongoing work. The submission has two parts. The first part, a research statement, should be no more than six (6) pages long. Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers.

It will be the basis for detailed discussions at the Consortium, and should include:

  • Motivation for the proposed research
  • Background and related work (including key references)
  • Description of proposed research, including main research questions
  • Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate)
  • Specific research issues for discussion at the Doctoral Consortium.

The second part, limited to one (1) page, describes benefits that would be obtained by attending the DC. It should be added as an appendix to the research statement and include:

  • A statement by the student saying why they want to attend the Consortium.
  • A brief statement (1 paragraph) by their advisor saying how the student would benefit by attending the DC. Advisors should also specifically state whether the student has written, or is close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent), and when they expect the student would defend their dissertation if they progress at a typical rate.

Format Requirements

All submissions must be written in English following the ECIR guidelines and the LNCS author guidelines and submitted electronically through EasyChair. The first page must contain the title of the paper, full author name, affiliation and contact details and an abstract of up to 250 words. Submissions will be reviewed by the members of the DC committee.

Accepted Papers

Students accepted to the Consortium will have the option of publishing a 4-page extended abstract summarizing their research in the full ECIR conference proceedings.

Important dates

Doctoral Consortium paper submission: November, 15,  2020, 11:59 pm (AoE)

Notification: 15 December 2020

Camera-ready copyJanuary 10, 2021  20 January 2021

Main Conference: March 28 – April 1, 2021

Doctoral Consortium Chairs: 

Claudio Lucchese,  Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy

Guido Zuccon, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Contact: DocConsortiumChairs@ecir2021.eu