The research jargon glossary

Researchers speak a dialect. Nobody hands you the dictionary, so here it is: the terms you will hear in your first year, one line each. Skim now, return whenever a meeting confuses you.

A to Z

Term	Meaning
Abstract	The 150 to 250 word summary at the top of a paper; often the only part people read
AoE	Anywhere on Earth: a deadline timezone, meaning you have time until the last place on the planet hits midnight
APC	Article processing charge, the fee for gold open access publishing
Artifact	The code, data, or materials behind a paper, sometimes formally evaluated for a badge
arXiv	The big free preprint server, pronounced “archive”
Camera-ready	The final, publisher-formatted version of an accepted paper; the name predates cameras being involved
Citation	A formal pointer to prior work; also the unit of academic credit
CFP	Call for papers: a venue’s announcement of topic, deadline, and rules
Corresponding author	The listed author who handles all email about the paper
Desk reject	Rejection by the editor or chairs before any review, usually for scope or rule violations
Double blind	Review where authors and reviewers are hidden from each other, see peer review, decoded
DOI	A permanent ID for a paper, like 10.1145/xxxxx; the reliable way to cite
et al.	Latin “and others”; “Smith et al.” means Smith plus the rest of the author list
h-index	A researcher metric: h papers with at least h citations each; treat with skepticism
Impact factor	Average recent citations per paper for a journal; a prestige proxy, also treat with skepticism
IRB	Institutional Review Board: the ethics committee that must approve studies involving humans
Keynote	The big invited talk that opens a conference day
Lit review	Reading and summarizing the existing work on a topic
LNCS	Springer’s yellow proceedings series, see ACM, IEEE, and friends
Major revision	Journal verdict: substantial fixes required, then re-review
Novelty	Whether the work does something genuinely new; reviewers’ favorite axe
PC	Program committee: the reviewer pool for a conference
PI	Principal investigator: the professor who leads the lab and holds the grant
Poster	A printed summary you present standing beside it at a conference session
Preprint	A paper shared publicly before peer review
Proceedings	The published collection of a conference’s accepted papers
Rebuttal	The authors’ short response to reviews before the decision
Related work	The paper section positioning your work among prior papers
Reproducibility	Whether others can rerun your work and get the same results
SIG	Special interest group; ACM’s subcommunities (SIGPLAN, SIGGRAPH)
Single blind	Review where reviewers know the authors but not vice versa
Submission number	Your paper’s anonymous ID during review; you will memorize it involuntarily
Supplementary material	Extra appendices, proofs, or videos submitted alongside the paper
Survey	A paper mapping an entire research area
Venue	Any place papers get published, see journals, conferences, and workshops
Version of record	The official published copy of a paper

How to use this

Do not memorize it. Bookmark it, then go read something real: the paper anatomy tour shows these words in their natural habitat, and what a research paper actually is ties the big ones together.