nsdi-related-work

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). 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:

# 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<yy>/presentation/<key>
# 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

[Lane coverage] table lane -> covered / gap (paper to add)
[Nearest neighbor] <paper, venue-verified> + 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