CSCW 2026 PAPERS MAY 2025 CYCLE FIRST ROUND DECISIONS

CSCW 2026 May 2025 cycle received 637 complete submissions. We received the following number of submissions under each self-identified Primary Research Paradigm.

As explained in this blog, CSCW 2026 has made adjustments to our peer review process outlined in the Call for Papers, including: (1) Introducing a Senior Program Committee (SPC) and a Program Committee (PC), (2) Refining the Desk Rejects/Assisted Desk Rejects phase, (3) Adding online Program Committee meetings (one for the Assisted Desk Reject phase and the other for the Resubmission of papers that received a Revise for External Review recommendation), and (4) Refining the External Review cycle.

To facilitate these changes, the Papers chairs formalized selection criteria to recruit experienced SPCs and PCs. Generally, CSCW 2026 SPCs are 5+ years post-PhD, have served multiple times as CSCW Associate Chairs (ACs) or Editors, and regularly publish at CSCW. Most CSCW 2026 PCs hold PhDs, have previously reviewed for CSCW or related HCI venues, and have been the lead author of a published CSCW paper. These criteria broadly align with recent discussions in the CHI Peer Review Working Group about minimum qualifications for AC and Subcommittee Chair (SC) roles at CHI.

As a result of these adjustments, CSCW 2026 takes a tiered approach to reviewing where externals will not need to review papers that are not ready.

First, the papers chairs assigned a Senior Program Committee member (SPC) to each complete submission. SPCs screened the papers they managed for potential desk reject cases, based on the criteria listed in the CfP. Papers that did not meet these criteria were then verified by the papers chairs and desk rejected.

Second, the papers chairs assigned a Program Committee member (PC) to each remaining paper. Both SPC and PC conducted a close read of the paper to identify its strengths, weaknesses, and contributions to CSCW. PC wrote a review and SPC drafted a meta-review. They each provided an initial assessment (definitely revise for external review, probably revise for external review, neutral, probably assisted desk reject, and definitely assisted desk reject). After the PC review was completed and checked for quality, the SPC and PC started a discussion to generate a preliminary recommendation, if possible, for each paper (whether to continue for external review or not).

Third, as a new addition to CSCW’s review process, the papers chairs held a synchronous online program committee (PC) meeting over two consecutive days with the SPCs and PCs to determine decisions for the first round of review (Revise for External Review or Assisted Desk Reject). We discussed papers with a range of decisions and S/PC agreement to help calibrate the committee and mentor new PCs. We found that having the PC meeting at this stage was highly valuable to the CSCW community. The whole committee counseled together and shared/established norms of publishable CSCW research. Drawing on collective memory, many years of experience, and diverse expertise, this process enabled us to support newer PCs and provide mentorship. PC meetings also served as a tool for accountability since SPCs and PCs presented their recommendations to their professional community.

While introducing a new process and structure inherently poses challenges, there were some external issues that made the paper review process much more difficult for the May 2025 Cycle:

• We received twice the amount of submissions typically received in recent spring CSCW submission cycles. Despite efforts to overestimate and recruit the S/PC before the submission deadline, our committee still had to handle many more papers than we had hoped. This made the timeline even tighter and put a heavy load on our SPCs and PCs.
• Thanks to our vigilant SPC, we were able to investigate and identify several PC reviews that violated the irresponsible review policy as published in our CFP (e.g, low-quality comments, indications of violating the LLM usage policy). As a result of this, we had to recruit ninja reviewers from the rest of the PC and even the CSCW 2026 Organizing Committee to replace these reviews. Despite our best efforts, some of these papers will be delayed and not receive a decision on time. Appropriate sanctions were enforced, including removal from the PC and desk rejecting submissions authored by the PC member as described in the “Policy on Irresponsible Reviews” section in our CFP. The incidents were reported to the CSCW steering committee. We may also report them to the ACM.
• We also investigated violations of the ACM policy on authorship such as hallucinated references and fabricated data. These violations are not always obvious, and it took having SPCs with expertise on the paper topic to detect and report these violations. We followed our written policies on reporting such papers to the ACM and desk rejecting them from CSCW 2026.

We credit our SPC structure with being able to efficiently identify these issues, and to do so much earlier on than in past CSCW submission cycles. Such a process does take much time and effort — this is the trade-off to maintaining a high level of quality in the CSCW peer review process. However, the last two bullets are especially egregious since they have cascading effects. Any other reviews written by the person who has written an irresponsible review or who has violated ACM authorship policy needs to be reexamined and potentially replaced by a different reviewer, and rediscussed with the SPC. We believe the community needs to prioritize developing ways to disincentivize such behaviors, as well as reward PC and SPC members who do an excellent job on time-consuming peer review tasks.

• Revise for External Review (325 papers). Authors that receive a Revise for external review will have 4 weeks to revise and resubmit their paper. This revised version will go out to 2 external reviewers. In this cycle, SPC, PC, and externals will review and discuss the paper and make an Accept with Minor Revisions, Major Revision, or Reject decision.
• Assisted Desk Reject (271 papers). Authors should only submit completed work of publishable quality and within the scope of ACM CSCW. The S/PC rejected papers that did not comply with such requirements. The SPC and PC also rejected any submission that they believed, after a close reading, had little chance of being accepted if it went through the peer review process. See ACM policy on “assisted desk reject”.
• Desk Reject or Withdrawn (41 papers). Some incomplete, non-anonymized, or otherwise inappropriate submissions were desk rejected without review.

As mentioned above, authors that receive a Revise for External Review decision will have 4 weeks to revise and resubmit their paper. This revised version will go out to 2 external reviewers. In this external review phase, SPC, PC, and externals will review and discuss the paper and make a Conditional Accept with Minor Changes, Revise and Resubmit, or Reject decision. For submissions that receive a Revise and Resubmit decision, the next steps will look much like the major revision process in previous years.

The advantage of having an initial 4-week revision cycle after SPC and PC feedback (and before going to external review), is that it allows authors to address major issues that SPC and PC already identified. This increases the probability that externals will not have to identify the same issues again, but rather can focus on additional issues they find. This also increases the likelihood that this revised version will be good enough for a Conditional Accept with Minor Changes, making the acceptance timeline faster for many papers.

We hope that the first round reviews will provide authors with constructive feedback on how to improve their submissions. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all SPCs and PCs for volunteering their time. Ethical and responsible peer review is fundamental to the academic research and publishing process, and we are committed to maintaining a high-quality review process for CSCW. We are extremely grateful to those who volunteered their time to contribute to this essential part of academic research and publishing.

PAPERS CHAIRS
Contact: papers2026@cscw.acm.org

• Kurt Luther (Virginia Tech, USA)
• Xiaojuan Ma (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR)
• Jeffrey Nichols (Apple, USA)
• Adriana S Vivacqua (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

PAPERS CHAIRS ASSISTANTS

• Yoonseo Choi (KAIST, South Korea)
• Reza H. Mogavi (University of Waterloo, Canada)

GENERAL CHAIRS
Contact: chairs2026@cscw.acm.org

• Guo Freeman (Clemson University, USA)
• Xinru Page (Brigham Young University, USA)