--- name: nsdi-related-work description: Use when positioning an NSDI submission against the networked-systems literature — covering the NSDI/SIGCOMM/OSDI/SOSP lanes plus both accepted-paper cohorts of the current edition, verifying venues against dblp and open-access USENIX proceedings, and handling self-citations and concurrent submissions under double-blind rules. --- # NSDI Related Work Related work at NSDI answers one reviewer question: *what does this design let us do that the systems we already have do not?* Coverage gaps read as either ignorance or evasion, and the venue's open-access record removes every excuse for both. ## The lanes an NSDI reviewer expects swept | Lane | Where it lives | What must be said about it | |---|---|---| | Direct competitors | NSDI, SIGCOMM, OSDI, SOSP | Mechanism-level delta, ideally measured head-to-head | | Same problem, other stack layer | SIGCOMM (protocol), OSDI/SOSP (host), FAST (storage) | Why this layer is the right place to solve it | | Same technique, other domain | broad systems + ML-systems venues | What the networked setting breaks or changes | | Measurement/characterization basis | IMC, NSDI measurement papers | Which observed phenomena motivated the design | | Deployed/industrial precedent | operational-track papers, provider tech reports | What production experience the design inherits or contradicts | | Early/idea-stage neighbors | HotNets, frontiers-track papers | That the idea's grown-up form differs from the sketch | Both **cohorts of the current edition** count as literature: NSDI posts spring accepted-paper lists months before the symposium (e.g., `usenix.org/conference/nsdi26/spring-accepted-papers`), so "it wasn't published yet" fails for a fall submission when the spring list was public at deadline time. Sweep the sibling deadlines too — SIGCOMM's accepted list frequently contains the closest neighbor of an NSDI submission. ## Verification: the venue must be proven Systems folklore misfiles its classics; citing Raft "at NSDI" or B4 "from NSDI" signals secondhand reading (Raft is USENIX ATC 2014, B4 is SIGCOMM 2013 — see the guard list in [`../../resources/exemplars/library.md`](../../resources/exemplars/library.md)). Every NSDI paper since the venue began is a free PDF on `usenix.org`, and dblp's `conf/nsdi` stream gives the authoritative edition/pages. Verify before the bibliography freezes: ```bash # Cross-check claimed venues in the .bib against dblp keys / USENIX URLs grep -E '^@' paper.bib | wc -l # inventory grep -A3 -iE 'booktitle.*(nsdi|sigcomm|osdi|sosp)' paper.bib | head -40 # For each NSDI claim: the usenix.org/conference/nsdi/presentation/ # page or the dblp record must exist. No render, no citation-as-NSDI. ``` Read the PDF of any paper you compare against quantitatively. Comparing against a system's abstract is how "prior work cannot handle churn" ends up in front of the reviewer who wrote the churn section. ## Positioning moves that work at this venue - **Delta by mechanism, not by adjective.** "X batches at the NIC; we batch at the RPC layer, which preserves per-request deadlines" beats "unlike X, our approach is more flexible." - **Concede the overlap, then locate the divergence.** NSDI reviewers usually know the neighbor papers personally; a generous one-clause summary of the competitor buys credibility for the distinction that follows. - **Use operational precedent as evidence, not decoration.** If a provider's operational-track paper reports the failure mode your design removes, that citation is motivation-grade, not related-work filler. - **Position against the measurement literature.** A design justified by workload properties should cite where those properties were measured — or measure them in §2. ## Double-blind mechanics for citations - **Self-citations stay, in third person.** "We extend Ballast [12]" reveals; "This work extends Ballast [12]" written as if by strangers does not. Omitting your own prior paper to hide identity is explicitly against the CFP. - **Concurrent NSDI submissions** are cited with the CFP's fixed sentence: "Under submission. Details omitted for double-blind reviewing." - **Tech reports and arXiv versions of your own work**: cite in third person like any prior art; do not link author-revealing artifacts in the text. - **Operational-track nuance:** the anonymization exception covers *your paper's* system and company names — it does not license identifying the *author list* through possessive phrasing. ## Sequencing the sweep across the two-deadline year Because NSDI publishes cohort lists mid-cycle, the sweep has a rhythm: 1. **At project start:** lanes 1-3 in depth; identify the two or three systems the paper must beat or distinguish, since they shape the evaluation (`nsdi-experiments`). 2. **Four weeks before the gate:** re-sweep the current edition's earlier cohort list and the most recent SIGCOMM/OSDI/SOSP programs; new neighbors get a mechanism-delta sentence, not a panicked rewrite. 3. **At bibliography freeze:** run the venue-verification pass below; fix misattributions before reviewers find them. 4. **In a one-shot revision:** re-check whether the reviewers' cited omissions have themselves been published since — the same reviewers will notice both presence and absence (`nsdi-author-response`). ## Failure patterns - The wall of one-line citations ("Much work has studied datacenter transport [3-19]") — coverage theater with no deltas. - Comparing only against academic prototypes when a widely deployed system solves an adjacent problem — reviewers from industry will supply the omission. - Treating a spring-cohort paper of the same edition as invisible. - Venue misattribution in the bibliography — cheap to fix, expensive in credibility. - A related-work section that never mentions the paper's own limits relative to prior work; positioning is bidirectional. ## Where the section lives NSDI drafts split positioning across two homes, both inside the 12 pages: a short contrast in the introduction (the two nearest neighbors, one delta sentence each) and the fuller section — conventionally late, before or after discussion — carrying the lane-by-lane sweep. Whichever home a comparison occupies, the quantitative version belongs in the evaluation: a related-work sentence claiming superiority that §6 never measures is a self-inflicted reviewer question. ## Output format ```text [Lane coverage] table lane -> covered / gap (paper to add) [Nearest neighbor] + mechanism delta [Cohort sweep] current-edition spring list checked? sibling deadlines? [Verification] # citations venue-proven / total NSDI-venue claims [Blind check] self-cites third-person? concurrent-submission wording? [Fix list] ordered corrections before bibliography freeze ```