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oopsla-related-work

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Use when building an OOPSLA related-work section — positioning against the PACMPL family (POPL, PLDI, ICFP, OOPSLA itself) plus ECOOP, Onward!, and SE venues, citing journal-era OOPSLA papers in PACMPL volume/issue form, verifying every venue attribution on dblp, and stating per-line technical deltas.

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OOPSLA Related Work

OOPSLA sits inside a family that shares authors and reviewers: POPL, PLDI, ICFP publish in the same PACMPL journal, ECOOP is the adjacent European OO venue, Onward! shares the SPLASH building, and ICSE/FSE/ISSTA overlap on empirical software questions — ISSTA was literally co-located with SPLASH 2026. The related-work section is therefore written for people who may have authored the cited lines, and who will meet your paper again if a revision round occurs. Two failure modes dominate: venue misattribution and delta-free citation lists.

Citation form in the journal era

Since OOPSLA became a PACMPL track, its papers are journal articles and must be cited as such:

@article{belyakova2020worldage,
  author  = {Belyakova, Julia and Chung, Benjamin and Gelinas, Jack
             and Nash, Jameson and Tate, Ross and Vitek, Jan},
  title   = {World Age in Julia: Optimizing Method Dispatch
             in the Presence of Eval},
  journal = {Proc. ACM Program. Lang.},
  volume  = {4},
  number  = {OOPSLA},
  articleno = {207},
  year    = {2020},
  doi     = {10.1145/3428275}
}

Recent volumes split into OOPSLA1 and OOPSLA2 issues — preserve the issue name (number = {OOPSLA1}) exactly as the ACM DL records it. Citing a PACMPL article as "In OOPSLA '24" is the kind of sloppiness family reviewers notice in their own papers' entries.

Verification discipline

Every venue claim gets checked, not remembered:

CheckToolWhat it catches
dblp key (conf/oopsla/ or journals/pacmpl/)dblp searchPLDI/POPL/ECOOP results misfiled as OOPSLA (see the cut list in resources/exemplars/library.md)
DOI resolves to claimed venueACM DLPreprint-vs-published divergence; wrong-year citations
Issue OOPSLA1 vs OOPSLA2ACM DL table of contentsHalf-year attribution errors in recent work
Sibling series coveragePer-venue dblp streamsThe "we searched OOPSLA only" blind spot

Deltas, not inventories

The family's standard is one technical difference per cited line of work, in the sentence where the citation appears:

  • Weak: "Ownership types have been widely studied [3,7,12,19]."
  • Strong: "[3] and [7] assume whole-program annotation; [12] recovers partial soundness but reports blame at the failure site rather than the boundary; we prove boundary blame is the weakest sound choice (§3)."

For concurrent work surfacing in the other round of the same volume — a genuinely OOPSLA-specific situation — cite it, mark it concurrent, and state the relationship without claiming priority; reviewer continuity means the committee likely knows both papers.

Coverage strategy

  • Sweep the last three volumes of PACMPL Issues OOPSLA1/OOPSLA2, plus the matching POPL/PLDI/ICFP issues, before declaring novelty.
  • Add ECOOP and the relevant SE venue (ICSE/FSE/ISSTA) whenever the claim is empirical or tooling-facing; add TOPLAS/JFP for journal-depth lines.
  • Onward! papers are citable idea-stage precedents: acknowledging one costs nothing and omitting one your reviewer wrote costs a lot.
  • Keep a claims-to-prior-work matrix in the repo; regenerate it at each round, because seven months pass between rounds and the family publishes continuously.

Output format

[Attribution audit] entries checked on dblp/DL: n/n, errors: <list>
[Citation form] PACMPL journal form used for post-2017 OOPSLA: yes/no
[Delta coverage] cited lines with explicit deltas: n/m + worst offenders
[Family sweep] OOPSLA/POPL/PLDI/ICFP/ECOOP/SE volumes covered
[Concurrent work] same-volume-round items flagged and handled