sosp-supplementary

name	sosp-supplementary
description	Use when deciding what belongs in a SOSP supplementary document versus the 12-page paper, packaging proofs, extended analyses, and methodological detail as a separate anonymized upload, and keeping review-critical evidence out of material reviewers are not obligated to read.

SOSP Supplementary Material

Use this while splitting content between the SOSP paper and its optional supplement. The CFP (2026 cycle, checked 2026-07-08 via sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2026/cfp.html and the sosp26.hotcrp.com submission form) allows supplementary material as a separate document uploaded alongside the anonymized PDF. Its charter is narrow: content that supports the paper but is not critical to evaluating it — formal proofs, extra data analyses, methodological detail. Reviewers may open it; nothing obligates them to.

The governing asymmetry

The paper must stand alone inside its 12 pages of technical content. The supplement can only deepen an argument the paper already completes — it cannot carry one. This produces a simple sorting rule for every candidate paragraph, proof, and figure:

Content	Where it lives	Why
The invariant your correctness claim rests on, stated and argued	Paper	Review-critical; a reviewer who skips the supplement must still be convinced
The full mechanized or manual proof of that invariant	Supplement	Depth behind a claim the paper already supports with a proof sketch
Headline performance results and their experimental setup	Paper	Claims and their primary evidence are inseparable
Per-workload breakdowns, extra hardware configurations, sensitivity sweeps	Supplement	Corroboration, not the load-bearing evidence
Anything a reviewer needs to check soundness of the method	Paper	"Not critical to evaluating the paper" excludes it from the supplement by definition
Pseudocode too long for the paper, trace-format specifications	Supplement	Methodological detail

The classic failure: page pressure at T-minus-two-weeks pushes the failure-recovery evaluation into the supplement, a reviewer never opens it, and the review reads "no failure experiments." During SOSP's response phase you may point back to the supplement — it was part of the submission — but a pointer in a sub-500-word response is a weak substitute for evidence on the reviewed pages.

Anonymity extends to the supplement

The supplement is reviewed under the same double-blind rules as the paper. It is the more dangerous document because it is assembled last and checked least:

• Appendix LaTeX often still carries \author blocks, acknowledgment stubs, or grant numbers from an earlier tech-report build.
• Extended data tables can leak cluster hostnames, internal project codenames, or usernames embedded in file paths.
• PDF metadata is regenerated at every compile; scrub the supplement's, not only the paper's.

# Run the same leak sweep on the supplement as on the paper
pdfinfo supplement.pdf | grep -iE '^(author|creator)'
pdftotext supplement.pdf - | grep -inE 'acknowledg|grant|@[a-z-]+\.(edu|com)|/home/[a-z]|corp\.' | head
# Cross-check: every paper reference to the supplement resolves
pdftotext main.pdf - | grep -oE 'supplement[a-z]* (§|Section |Appendix )?[A-Z0-9.]*' | sort -u

Supplement, artifact, and appendix are three different objects

Teams routinely conflate three artifacts with different clocks and audiences:

1. Supplementary document — submitted with the paper in April, anonymized, read (maybe) by paper reviewers. Governed by this skill.
2. Artifact package — prepared after acceptance for the sysartifacts evaluation, non-anonymous, exercised by a separate committee (see sosp-artifact-evaluation). Do not burn April effort polishing container images no paper reviewer will run.
3. Camera-ready appendix — final papers get 13 pages (14 with shepherd approval), so some supplement content may graduate into the paper itself after acceptance (see sosp-camera-ready).

Plan the April supplement knowing routes 2 and 3 exist: its only job is to survive review, not to be the archival record of everything you know.

Structuring for a skimming reviewer

A SOSP reviewer opening the supplement is looking for one specific thing mid-review. Optimize for that entry pattern:

• Open with a half-page map: each supplement section, one line on what it adds, and which paper section or claim it backs.
• Number supplement sections to continue or clearly reference the paper's numbering, and cite them from the paper precisely ("full proof in supplement §B.2"), never as a bare "see supplement."
• Keep each section self-contained enough to read without the neighboring ones; a reviewer chasing the proof of Invariant I2 should not need supplement §A first.

Output format

[Split audit] review-critical content found in supplement? <list or none>
[Paper -> supplement pointers] all resolve? <broken refs>
[Anonymity] supplement metadata + text sweep result
[Confusion check] AE-only material mistakenly built now? camera-ready graduation list?
[Map] supplement sections -> paper claims they back
[Fix order] <moves before the upload>