PVLDB Volume 19 — Submission Guidelines

New for PVLDB Volume 19

Contributing to the Review Board (Effective May 2025)

To ensure that all papers receive high quality reviews, authors of submitted papers are asked to nominate a qualified reviewer (i.e., authors with at least two previous papers in SIGMOD, VLDB or ICDE conferences), who may be invited as a Light Load Reviewer with up to 3 paper assignments in total.

See Contributing to the Review Board below for details.

Monthly Submission Cap for PVLDB (Effective November 2025)

PVLDB has introduced of a monthly submission cap of two papers per author, effective from November 2025. This policy will cover the remaining submission cycles of VLDB 2026 and future submission cycles of VLDB 2027 to form a continuous 12-month period under the new rule.

See Monthly Submissions Cap for details.

Self-Declaration of Related Submissions (Effective January 2026)

To ensure transparent and fair evaluation, PVLDB requires authors to self-declare all related submissions that are concurrently under review by the same authors, if such submissions can potentially affect the assessment of how novel/incremental the current submission's contributions are relative to them. While the existing PVLDB policy covers previously published work through the related-work section, the new policy extends this requirement to include all relevant papers currently submitted to PVLDB or any other venue. Such works must be explicitly cited and discussed as “under submission” to enable the Review Board to assess the manuscript’s incremental contribution under the assumption that the earlier submission will be accepted. Failure to disclose related concurrent submissions, if discovered during the review process, will be treated as a breach of policy.

PVLDB Scope Policy (Effective January 2026)

PVLDB considers a submission to be in scope if it builds upon the database research literature, substantively addresses data management challenges, and/or demonstrates contributions that advance data management. Scope is determined strictly from the submitted manuscript itself—not by topic labels, keywords, or prior PVLDB publications on adjacent themes. Authors working at the boundaries of traditional data management topics are strongly encouraged to use the Self-Assessment of Relevance (SAR) box in the submission form to clarify the paper’s relevance.

See PVLDB Scope Policy for details.

General Information

Papers are to be formatted according to the conference's camera-ready format, as embodied in the document templates. There are four categories of papers in the research track, as described under Guidelines for Contributions:

All the content, including any appendices but excluding the references, must fit on the given number of pages. See Formatting Guidelines for details. Only the references can extend a paper beyond the page limit, and there is no limit on the number of pages used for them. The conference management tool for the submission of abstracts, papers, and supplemental material is accessible at:

For Experiment, Analysis & Benchmark Papers, Vision Papers, and Scalable Data Science Papers, you need to append the category tag as a suffix to the title of the paper such as “Data Management in the Year 3000 [Vision]”; “Comparing Spatial Database Systems [Experiment, Analysis & Benchmark]”; “Data Cleaning in the Wild [Scalable Data Science]”. This must be done both in the paper file and in the CMT submission title. The suffix will not be part of the camera-ready copy if the paper is accepted.

VLDB is a single-blind conference. Therefore, authors MUST include their names and affiliations on the first page of the manuscript.

Submission Process and Deadlines

PVLDB uses a novel review process designed to promote timely submission, review, and revision of scholarly results. The process will be carried out over 12 submission deadlines during the year preceding the VLDB Conference. The basic cycle will operate as follows:

While all attempts will be made to adhere to the schedule mentioned above, authors are advised that reviewing turnaround times may be subject to fluctuations.

Monthly Submissions Cap

The PVLDB Advisory Board has approved the introduction of a monthly submission cap of two papers per author, effective from November 2025. This policy will cover the remaining submission cycles of VLDB 2026 and future submission cycles of VLDB 2027 to form a continuous 12-month period under the new rule.

Why this policy?

PVLDB has experienced sharp submission surges in recent cycles, which created imbalances in the review process and risked lowering the quality of evaluations in the month of overload. To safeguard review quality, we need mechanisms that smooth submission fluctuations and prevent overload, while still maintaining substantial submission opportunities for authors.

How will the cap be enforced?

• For any paper with ID = k, if one of its authors already has two other submissions with ID < k in the same month, then the paper will be desk rejected.
• Revision submissions are not counted toward this limit.
• Cap-based filtering is applied before other checks (e.g., conflict of interest, scope, formatting).
• A paper that passes the cap filter may be subject to desk rejection for other reasons.

Benefits

An impact study on past PVLDB submission history showed that no author would have been constrained by the implied yearly cap of 24 submissions, while the largest monthly peak would have been reduced by up to 20%, significantly alleviating peak reviewing load.

This policy therefore reflects a balance between:
 1. Supporting the growth of PVLDB;
 2. Protecting the sustainability and quality of our review process.

We thank the community for their understanding and cooperation in ensuring that PVLDB continues to thrive as a high-quality venue for database research.

PVLDB Scope Policy

The PVLDB Scope Policy specifies the criteria used to determine whether a submission falls within PVLDB’s scope. Scope is assessed solely on the content of the submitted manuscript. In particular, PVLDB evaluates scope based on:
 1. Core Data Management Focus: Whether the paper addresses data management challenges (e.g., scalability, efficiency, storage, lifecycle, queryability) and presents contributions that advance these challenges.
 2. Connection to the Database Research Literature: Whether the paper builds upon or engages with relevant prior work published in data management venues. Submissions that do not reference or connect to the DB literature cannot be reviewed by the PVLDB Board.
 3. Evaluation in Data Management Contexts: Whether the experimental evaluation is grounded in motivating data management applications and demonstrates that the proposed techniques advance data management.

PVLDB recognizes that adjacent areas (including hardware systems, ML/AI, theory, security, knowledge representation, and others) can be highly relevant to data management. Scope is not determined by keywords, topic labels, or the existence of prior PVLDB papers on related subjects. It is determined by applying the above criteria to the submitted manuscript itself.

Authors submitting work outside traditional data management topics are strongly encouraged to complete the Self-Assessment of Relevance (SAR) section in the submission form. Authors should explicitly highlight: (i) the key data management challenges addressed in the paper and (ii) the principled ideas and contributions to data management. It is particularly helpful to reference specific sections of the paper where these contributions appear.

Examples indicating relevance:
 • The paper leverages ML models but makes core contributions to data management—for example, proposing new ways to organize, maintain, or exploit data and models as first-class managed entities.
 • The paper advances machine learning by improving its efficiency, scalability, or usability (e.g., ML operation support, model serving, model versioning, model deployment) with data management techniques.
 • The paper expands what can be queried or efficiently answered by a database—for example, using data mining methods, ML models, or LLMs to derive properties of database objects or external objects that can be integrated or “joined” with database data.

Examples that are less likely to be in scope:
 • The paper addresses a topic previously explored in VLDB, but unlike the prior work, the new submission does not engage with or build upon the relevant DB literature.
 • The paper cites a few DB papers, but its primary contribution lies in improving model accuracy rather than advancing data management.

Conflict and Authorship

To minimize biases in the evaluation process, we use CMT's conflict management system, through which authors should flag conflicts with members of the Editorial Board.

Conflict Declaration on CMT: Each author is responsible for entering their own domain and individual PC conflicts on CMT. All authors of a paper (listed in the pdf) must register themselves in CMT and declare their individual domain and PC conflicts at the time of submission. It is the full responsibility of all authors of a paper to identify and declare all CoIs with members of the Editorial Board (Reviewers, Associate Editors, and Editors in Chief) prior to the submission deadline. Conflicts of interest will also be checked using an automated CoI detection tool. Submissions with undeclared conflicts or spurious conflicts will be desk-rejected.

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

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

X and Y have a conflict of interest (CoI) if any of the following applies:

Contributing to the Review Board

To ensure that all papers receive high quality reviews, authors of submitted papers may be invited to assist in the reviewing process. More specifically, every submission must nominate at least one of its own authors who is a qualified reviewer (i.e., authors with at least two previous papers in SIGMOD, VLDB or ICDE conferences). If no qualified reviewer is available, the authors should nominate the best-qualified author for consideration by the Editors-in-Chief.

When necessary, the EiCs may invite the nominated author to join the review board as a Light Load Reviewer, who may be requested to review (at most) 1 paper each month, up to 3 papers in total.

Transparency and Reproducibility

Authors are expected to submit supplemental material, such as code, data, and other implementation artifacts used to produce the results reported in the paper. Reviewers and meta reviewers will have access to the supplemental material and consider it in their evaluation of the submission. As part of the meta reviews for accepted submissions, Associate Editors will use a standard rubric to assess the availability of supplemental materials, ensuring their openness and permanence, as well as the readability of instructions for the reuse of the artifacts by other members of the community.

Authors should place the supplemental material in a publicly accessible archival repository and provide a URL during the submission process. Please use standard openly accessible file sharing services with well-understood privacy policies and permanence guarantees, e.g., a public GitHub repository, or open commercial repositories such as Figshare or Dryad. Personal web pages are not acceptable for this purpose. URLs that raise doubt about security and anonymity of access will cause delays in paper evaluation and acceptance.

If authors are not submitting the supplemental material, they must explain why. We understand that there may be compelling reasons; for example, data/code may contain copyrighted contents, artifacts may be a commercialization candidate, or availability may simply not be applicable (e.g., for a vision paper containing no experiments). So long as a reasonable explanation is provided, the paper will be excused from the availability requirement and will not be penalized for the absence of supplemental material. On the other hand, “we ran out of time” and “too much work to prepare our code” would not be acceptable excuses — authors will be asked to address the availability issue before the paper can be accepted.

All accepted papers that provide supplementary materials meeting the availability requirement will be awarded an official ACM badge: https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/artifact-review-and-badging-current

Additionally, we strongly encourage the authors to participate in the PVLDB Reproducibility Evaluation (https://vldb.org/pvldb/reproducibility) and compete for the Best Reproducible Paper Award.

Note that Experiment, Analysis & Benchmark (EA&B) papers (see Guidelines for Contributions for details) are required to:

EA&B papers whose authors are not committed to making their results reproducible will be rejected.

Resubmission, Originality and, Duplicate Submissions

Authors are not allowed to resubmit work that was previously rejected from the research tracks of PVLDB, within one year of the original submission date. A paper withdrawn by the authors after a revision decision will be considered as rejected and the 12-month resubmission embargo applies to such papers as well. A submission rejected from the research track may not be resubmitted within 12 months to the PVLDB research track.

Note that the resubmission embargo does not apply, in either direction, to papers submitted to the VLDB Conference that do not go through the PVLDB review process, including tracks such as Industrial and Demonstrations.

A paper submitted to PVLDB must present original work not described in any prior publication that is more than 4 double-column VLDB-style 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 a PVLDB 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.

A paper submitted to PVLDB cannot be under review for any other publishing forum or presentation venue, including conferences, workshops, and journals, during the time it is being considered for PVLDB. After you submit a paper to PVLDB, you must await the response from PVLDB and only resubmit elsewhere if your paper is rejected, or withdrawn at your request, from PVLDB.

More details on publication policies can be found at: https://vldb.org/pvldb/general-information/publication-policies