Manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the IEEE format available at https://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.

Research papers must not exceed 12 pages not including the references. No appendix is allowed. Only electronic submissions in PDF format will be considered.

A paper submitted to ICDE 2026 cannot be under review for any other conference or journal during the entire time it is considered for ICDE 2026, and it must be substantially different from any previously published work.

A paper submitted to ICDE 2026 must present original work not described in any prior publication that is more than 4 double-column pages in length. A prior publication is a paper that has been accepted for presentation at a refereed conference or workshop with proceedings; or an article that has been accepted for publication in a refereed journal. If an ICDE 2026 submission has overlap with a prior publication, the submission must cite the prior publication, along with all other relevant published work, even if this prior publication is at or below the 4-page length threshold.

Any author of ICDE 2026 should not be a co-author of more than 10 submitted research papers across the two submission rounds.

Submissions will be reviewed in a single-blind manner. Submissions that are rejected in the first round of the IEEE ICDE 2026 research track are not eligible for re-submission to the second round.

The best papers (as judged by the ICDE 2026 PC) will be selected for submission as an extended version to be published in the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).

IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution (e.g., remove it from IEEE Xplore) after the conference if none of the authors attend the conference to present their paper.

Paper should be submitted using the Conference Management Tool https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICDE2026.

Manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the IEEE format, and submitted to the ICDE 2026 Industrial Track submission website: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICDEIndustrial2026.

Long papers must not exceed 12 pages plus unlimited space for references, and short papers must not exceed 6 pages plus unlimited space for references. Only electronic submissions in PDF format will be considered. Papers that do not follow the guidelines or are not within the scope of topics relevant to ICDE will be desk rejected. Authors are encouraged to contact the industrial track chairs if they need clarification regarding the suitability of their work to this track.

A paper submitted to ICDE 2026 cannot be under review for any other conference or journal during the entire time it is considered for ICDE 2026, and it must be substantially different from any previously published work.

Submissions will be reviewed in a single-blind manner. Each submission must include all author names and affiliations. Changes to the author list after paper acceptance are not permitted. In case an exceptional situation arises necessitating a change in the author list, the situation needs to be explained via email to the industrial track chairs, who will decide whether to approve the change.

All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings. IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference (e.g., removal from IEEE Xplore), if none of the authors attends the conference to present their paper.

ICDE research track submissions that don't meet the following requirements may be rejected without review.

Submissions must follow the aforementioned guidelines and length requirements specified in the ICDE 2026 Call for Papers.

Submissions must be in scope of ICDE 2026. Specifically, this means that a submission must align with at least one of the above topic areas defined for ICDE 2026 and situate itself within the state of the art of current and past research in the database community in general and within the selected topic(s) in particular. For example, submissions that purely advance machine learning approaches not relating to any data management aspects (e.g. scalability and efficiency) would be considered as not in scope of ICDE.

Authors must correctly declare all conflicts of interest (COI) with members of the program committee. Both, not reporting COIs as well as frivolously defining COIs, count as a violation of this requirement. The exact definition of a COI is specified in the ICDE 2026 Call for Papers.

It is the full responsibility of all authors of a paper to identify and declare all COIs with members of the Program Committee (Area Chairs and PC members) prior to the submission deadline. Submissions with undeclared conflicts or spurious conflicts will be desk-rejected.

With stricter COI rules than before, we understand that finding COIs with a large review board requires considerable extra effort. To facilitate this process, we provide a searchable spreadsheet of COIs (based on DBLP data) with the review board.

Authors can use this spreadsheet as a resource when declaring COIs during submission. It is not meant to be authoritative or cover all types of COIs, so authors must still do their due diligence to identify and declare COIs missing from the list. This spreadsheet may be updated during the year as well, so please be sure to check prior to every submission.

Searchable spreadsheet with COIs for authors’ convenience: searchable spreadsheet.

After a paper is accepted, the set of authors cannot be changed.

Submissions that were desk rejected in Round 1 due to COI violations, failure to follow length and formatting instructions, or being out of scope for ICDE may be resubmitted in Round 2. The responsibility rests with the authors to ensure their paper meets all submission requirements.

Conflict declaration on CMT:

In order to declare COIs in CMT, each author of a submission must create a CMT profile and complete it with domain and individual conflicts. If a CMT profile is missing for at least one author of a submission, the paper will be desk rejected.

You can mark your conflicts by clicking on your name (upper right-hand side on CMT) and selecting “Domain Conflicts” and “Individual Conflicts”. An author’s declared conflicts will be automatically applied to all of their submissions.

Review Quality: ICDE 2026 papers will be stringently reviewed with at least 3 reviews per paper. The review process will be coordinated by the meta reviewer resulting in one of the decisions to either accept, reject, or revise the submission. A meta review will be provided based on the discussions about the paper. Paper revisions will go through an additional round of reviews before a final decision is made to accept or reject the paper.

Revisions: Papers will be invited to submit a revised version of their paper if the PC believes the papers can reasonably be improved within the allocated revision time frame. Authors will have five weeks to prepare their revisions. The revision process is intended to be a constructive interaction between reviewers and authors.

We value Diversity and Inclusion in our community and profession. Both are important in our writing as well. Be mindful in your writing of not using language or examples that further the marginalization, stereotyping, or erasure of any group of people, especially historically marginalized and/or under-represented groups (URGs) in computing. Also be vigilant and guard against unintentionally exclusionary examples. Reviewers will be empowered to monitor and demand changes if such issues arise. Going further, also consider actively raising the representation of URGs in your writing. Diversity of representation in writing is a simple but visible avenue to celebrate and ultimately help improve our community’s diversity.

During submission of a research paper, the submission site will request information about Conflicts of Interest (COI) of the paper’s authors with program committee (PC) members. It is the full responsibility of all authors of a paper to identify all (and only) PC members with potential COIs as per the definition provided here. Papers with incorrect or incomplete COI information as of the submission closing time are subject to immediate rejection.

Definition of Conflict of Interest (COI):

An author X of an ICDE 2026 research paper has a COI with a PC member or Area Chair Y if and only if one or more of the following conditions hold:

• X is a co-author of another ICDE 2026 submission together with Y.
• X is a co-author of Y in a publication in the past three years.
• X has been a co-author of Y for 4 (or more) publications in the last 10 years.
• X has been a co-worker of Y in the same company or university within the past three years.
• X has been a collaborator of Y within the past three years (e.g., held a joint grant).
• X is or was Y's primary thesis advisor or vice versa, no matter how long ago.
• X is a relative or a close personal friend of Y (or vice versa).

The onus for correctly declaring COIs rests with the authors who must submit their complete set of COIs for a submission to be considered for review.