How the CHI 2027 Papers Review Process Will Work
Authors: Anna Cox, Tony Tang, Thomas Kosch, Erin Solovey, Petra Isenberg, Regan Mandryk
Date: 2026-08-17
This blog post aims to explain what has changed in the CHI 2027 paper review process and provide justification for those changes.
CHI is growing. That growth reflects the vitality, breadth, and global relevance of HCI. It also means that the review process must evolve so that it remains fair, sustainable, rigorous, and respectful of the community labor that makes CHI possible.
The Papers track uses a staged review process. The goal is not to predetermine an acceptance rate or a fixed number of accepted papers. The goal is to make sure that the papers receiving full peer review are those for which full review is appropriate, and that every paper that reaches that stage receives careful, expert, constructive evaluation.
This post explains what authors, reviewers, Associate Chairs (AC), and Subcommunity Chairs (SC) can expect.
This year, CHI is piloting AI-assisted tools (a blog post with more details on these will follow soon) to help with matching papers to ACs and reviewers, initial screening for Desk Rejects (DR) and Assisted Desk Rejects (ADR), and completeness checks at submission. Decisions about a paper, from desk reject to final outcome, remain with the responsible Associate Chair, Subcommunity Chair, and Papers Chairs, as they always have.
1. Paper submission
The CHI 2027 full paper deadline is Thursday, September 10, 2026, Anywhere on Earth (AoE). The submission site opens on Thursday, August 13, 2026. CHI 2027 does not have a separate abstract deadline. Paper reviews will be released on November 5, 2026, resubmissions are due on December 3, 2026, and final notifications are on December 17, 2026. Authors whose papers do not proceed to full external review will be notified around October 26, 2026.
At submission, authors will provide the full paper and required metadata – this will include descriptors indicating the authors’ views on what expertise is needed to review their paper. In addition, under the new review responsibility model, each author team will declare review responsibility slots from within the author list. The Review Responsibility Policy requires the authors of each submitted paper to contribute four completed reviews, with the author team naming eligible authors who will carry out that responsibility where applicable (more on this below).
Each author will also provide the information needed to support responsible review matching and assessment. This includes providing appropriate expertise information, conflicts, and review-role eligibility information. The purpose is to ensure that the reviewing capacity CHI needs is created at the same time as submissions enter the system, rather than relying on recruitment from an already overburdened volunteer pool.
After submission, an automated completeness check runs on each paper. This tool verifies that the review responsibility slots are properly declared, that named reviewer-authors have valid ORCIDs, and that the paper has sufficient descriptors for keyword-based matching. Authors receive a completeness report and have a short window to address any flagged issues before screening begins.
2. Initial assignment to Subcommunity Chairs and Associate Chairs
After the submission deadline, the Papers Chairs will first run basic administrative checks and prepare submissions for the staged review process. Papers will then be routed through the process in phases.
For CHI 2027, the review model moves away from the traditional 1AC/2AC structure. Papers that reach full review will be managed by one Associate Chair (AC), who will act as the review manager and synthesizer. Subcommunity Chairs (SC) will provide oversight across groups of ACs, monitoring review quality, consistency, fairness, and process integrity. Under the proposed model, each AC handles approximately 15 papers, and each SC oversees around 10–15 ACs.
Assignments will balance expertise, conflicts of interest, and workload.
3. Desk Reject Process
The first stage is the traditional desk reject screening. This is for submissions that cannot proceed to review because they fail basic requirements. Examples include incomplete submissions, anonymization violations, wrong format, undeclared concurrent submissions, out-of-scope papers, papers not written in English, papers that are so broken that they cannot be reviewed, and papers that violate the ACM Policy on Authorship. There will also be desk rejections for issues such as excessive length without sufficient justification.
This stage is not intended to make a scholarly judgment about borderline work. It is intended to protect the integrity of the review process. Associate Chairs, Subcommunity Chairs, and Papers Chairs are responsible for identifying papers that should be desk-rejected. To help them handle the volume of CHI 2027 submissions, the Papers Chairs run an automated screening tool that surfaces candidate papers for review. Each flagged paper is examined by the AC, then confirmed by an SC and a Paper Chair before any desk reject is issued. Desk-rejected submissions will not be assigned to a reviewer, and their authors will receive a brief explanation from the SC.
For context, in CHI 2026, desk reject rates varied substantially by subcommittee, from 1.4% to 17.9% of submissions. Across the listed CHI 2026 data, there were 465 desk rejections out of 6,730 submissions, or approximately 7.2%.
In addition to the criteria above, the Review Responsibility Policy requires the authors of each submitted paper to contribute four completed reviews, with the author team naming eligible authors who will carry out that responsibility where applicable. If a declared reviewer fails to fulfil their responsibility, their submission(s) are desk-rejected.
4. Assisted Desk Reject Phase
After basic desk reject checks, CHI 2027 will use an Assisted Desk Reject (ADR) phase. This is one of the most significant changes in the process.
The purpose of ADR is to identify papers that appear to have a realistic path to acceptance and should therefore proceed to full peer review. This is not because other papers are unimportant, nor because CHI wants to reduce opportunity. It is because full peer review is a scarce community resource. Sending every submission to three external reviewers and an AC, including papers with no viable path to acceptance, creates an unsustainable burden on reviewers and reduces the time and care available for papers that need detailed expert adjudication.
For CHI 2027, the AC is responsible for deciding whether a paper receives an ADR outcome. To help ACs manage the volume, an AI-assisted tool will assess the paper against a rubric based on ACM criteria (Originality, Correctness, Novelty, Importance, and Clarity of Exposition) to produce a preliminary report for each paper. The rubric is method-agnostic and focuses on the alignment between claims and the evidence, argument, or design work that supports them. We will share another blogpost in the near future with more details about this tool.
The AC reads the paper together with the rubric assessment report and forms their own judgment. To help ACs manage the volume of submissions, the Papers Chairs run an automated tool that creates a report, which will be read by ACs. If the AC concludes the paper is a candidate for ADR, an SC will review and confirm before any notification goes to authors.
Our working target is to focus full external review on the approximately 50–60% of submissions that, after the traditional desk reject and ADR phases, appear to have the strongest path toward acceptance. This will require ~20,000 reviews (15,000 external reviews and 5,000 AC meta reviews). This is a substantial change from prior years, where the CHI 2026 assisted desk rejections accounted for 492 submissions, or approximately 7.3%, and ~86% of submissions were sent out for peer review, resulting in a total of 24,099 reviews.
The reason for the change is scale: CHI’s submission growth makes it increasingly difficult to provide a high-quality full review for every submitted paper without overloading the community. CHI 2026 received 6,730 complete submissions, a 34% increase over 2025 and a 66% increase over 2024. We are working with the prediction that CHI’s submission growth continues to increase: our modeling suggests something between 8500 and 26,000 submissions by 2030 (see graphs below), whilst others suggest submissions could even reach 30,000.
Authors whose papers do not proceed to full external review will be notified around October 25 and receive written feedback from the AC.
Papers that proceed to full review will not have their final outcomes determined by ADR ratings; instead, written reviews and the AC meta-review will determine the outcome of full peer review.
5. Assignment of remaining papers for full review
After Desk Reject and ADR, the remaining papers, approximately 50%-60% of submissions under the working target, will be assigned for full peer review.
This assignment will be load-balanced across SCs and ACs. The aim is to ensure that each AC has a manageable set of papers, that SCs can provide meaningful oversight, and that papers are matched to people with appropriate topical and methodological expertise. The AC chooses three external reviewers for each paper they manage. To reduce the reviewer-search burden that has historically fallen on ACs, the matching system suggests three candidate reviewers from the review responsibility pool based on how well their registered expertise matches the paper’s descriptors. The AC can accept these suggestions, swap them for others, or find alternate reviewers whose expertise better matches the paper.
This is also where CHI 2027’s new review responsibility model matters. Because submitting author teams contribute to the reviewer pool, the review system can better align reviewing capacity with submission volume. The restructuring proposal frames this as a shift from ad hoc volunteer labour toward shared reviewing infrastructure.
6. Full reviewing: what authors can expect
Papers that enter full review will receive:
Three substantive external reviews, written by qualified reviewers.
One meta-review, written by the AC.
The AC will read the paper, evaluate the external reviews, resolve disagreements where needed, guide discussion, and synthesize the decision rationale. This model gives the AC a clearer editorial role and removes the expectation that a second AC must also write a full review.
Reviewers are expected to provide careful, constructive, and scientifically grounded evaluations. The minimum qualifications policy emphasizes that reviewing is a scientific assessment, and that reviewer teams should collectively cover the topic and methodological expertise needed to evaluate a submission fairly.
New to CHI 2027 is the implementation of an Emergency Review Board (ERB), composed of experienced reviewers who can handle a range of submission domains and methods, and commit to providing reviews in the final two weeks of the process. Life happens, and sometimes reviewers do not deliver; therefore, we are implementing this approach to reduce the burden on ACs and SCs to find last-minute high-quality reviews and meta-reviews, by acknowledging this need and including it in the process by design.
7. Program Committee meetings and first decisions
At the end of October, the Program Committee will calibrate decisions, discuss complex cases, and finalize first-round outcomes. These tasks will be led by SCs and are important not only for decision-making, but also for consistency, mentoring, and shared accountability across the program.
At this stage, papers will receive one of three outcomes:
Minor revisions.
The paper is on a clear path to acceptance, provided the authors complete specific, bounded revisions.
Major revisions required.
The paper has a promising contribution, but the required changes are more substantial and need further review.
Reject.
The paper will not continue in the CHI 2027 process.
The language of “accept subject to minor revisions” is intentional. It signals that these papers will not be re-reviewed. Instead, the decision identifies whether the paper has a path to acceptance at CHI 2027, and what work is needed to complete that path.
SCs have flexibility in how they calibrate decisions; however, we will be supporting SCs to group together where it makes sense and providing guidance and support for executing PC meetings and building communities. We are giving SCs a lot of autonomy in how PC meetings happen if they have their own ideas (size, time zone, synchronicity, tools). We understand that this will allow for variance this year, but we also hope that it empowers new ideas from the peer-review leaders who are participating as SCs (or even ACs) and that best practices can emerge quickly as a result.
8. Revisions: no target acceptance rate, no fixed number of papers
CHI 2027 is not aiming for a predetermined acceptance rate. It is also not aiming for a predetermined number of accepted papers.
This is important. The purpose of the staged process is not to make CHI smaller for its own sake. It is to focus full review effort where it is most useful, improve the quality and fairness of evaluation, and create a sustainable model for a growing community.
Papers should be accepted because they meet CHI’s standards after review and revision. Papers should be rejected because the review process identifies unresolved issues that prevent acceptance. The number of accepted papers will be the result of that process, not a quota set in advance.
9. December re-review and final decisions
Revisions will be due December 3, 2026, with final notification on December 17, 2026.
For papers with an Accept with Minor Revisions decision, the AC will review the authors’ changes. The AC will determine whether the requested changes have been adequately addressed and will make a final recommendation of Accept or Reject.
For papers with a Major Revisions Required decision, the revised paper will go back to reviewers. Reviewers will assess whether the authors have addressed the substantive concerns from the first round. The AC will then write a final meta-review and make the final decision, in consultation with SCs where needed to ensure consistency and fairness.
10. FAQ on CHI Peer Review Restructuring
We are genuinely grateful for the time and care that so many of you put into your feedback, responses to our online forms, and questions during community-engagement sessions. As many pointed out, it is no easy task to rethink our review process, and we have strived throughout the process to minimise the volunteer workload and ensure good quality publications are maintained. This requires a multipronged approach, which we have outlined in our 5-point peer-review restructuring plan.
On minimum qualifications
Q: Will the minimum qualifications create barriers for researchers who are qualified but do not have a CHI publication record, including those from the Global South, adjacent fields, or those with publication gaps due to caregiving or health?
The qualifications are intended to ensure that reviewers have sufficient familiarity with CHI standards and methodological diversity, but we recognise that publication record at CHI can vary significantly.
To be clear, anyone can submit a CHI paper. There are no minimum requirements for submitting a paper.
Ensuring there are minimum requirements for the review process allows better consistency in the review process, to ensure CHI remains the flagship venue for HCI research. For senior roles (AC and above), the bar is higher and appropriately so, given the decision-making responsibility involved.
Q: I have served as Associate Chair at CHI before, but I do not meet the new minimum requirements to be an AC. Does this mean I can no longer be an AC?
If you do not meet the minimum requirements to be an AC, then you cannot serve as one. The minimum requirements policy states that Associate Chairs in the full paper process are required to meet the following criteria:
- Prior Associate Chair experience at a SIGCHI specialized conference, CHI Late-Breaking Work/Poster track, or equivalent reviewing leadership role
- Completion of at least 8 full-paper reviews at CHI within the past 8 years
- At least 5 full publications in HCI venues, including a minimum of 2 CHI full papers (preferably as lead or senior author).
- At least 5 years of professional experience in HCI following completion of an undergraduate degree.
These criteria are in place to ensure that ACs play a key role in maintaining scientific quality in the review process, and it is important to ensure there is a level of familiarity with CHI’s expectations and processes.
On workload for authors
Q: The combined requirement of 4 full reviews feels unmanageable. Is this really per submission?
Each submitted paper requires 3 external reviews and 1 meta-review. Therefore, we ask each author team to provide the same amount of input regarding the reviews they request from the community when they submit their paper.
To be clear about how the numbers work: each submission requires the author team to collectively declare 4 review responsibility slots across their author list. For example, if there are 2 co-authors on a paper, each could commit to reviewing two papers.
We heard that this can create a disproportionate burden on small teams, solo researchers, and faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions, where graduate students may not meet the minimum qualifications. There is an exemption process for situations where no author meets the qualifications.
Q: What if I regularly submit papers with undergraduate students, early-career co-authors, or others who do not qualify as reviewers?
If none of you and your co-authors meet the minimum qualifications for reviewers, you are exempt from nominating reviewers for that submission, but this exemption must be declared at submission time. We recognise that in practice, this often means the senior author carries the entire review load.
Q: Will this stop time-constrained researchers, e.g., those with caregiving responsibilities, from being able to submit?
No. Anyone is able to submit to CHI. There is an exemption process for these situations.
Q: Can I decline to review a paper if it’s a bad fit?
Our policy on minimum qualifications says:
“reviewers are expected to demonstrate the following characteristics:
- Awareness of research methods beyond one’s own specialization
- Ability to recognize limits of personal expertise
- Careful and independent authorship of reviews
- Willingness to evaluate work within its methodological context”
You can decline a review request if the paper is a very poor match for your expertise. In most cases, you’ll be offered a replacement paper to review instead, and completing that replacement fulfils your review responsibility for that slot. If we’re unable to find you a suitable replacement, the decline stands on its own and does not affect your submission’s status.
The Program Committee will look at declines to make sure the process is being used in good faith. Repeated or unjustified declines (e.g., declining every paper offered) will lead to the reviewer’s own submission being desk-rejected under the Review Responsibility Policy.
Q: What happens if I do not receive enough review requests based on my declared slots?
Let’s assume you submit one paper, and you are the only eligible author on the paper to review, so you are due 4 full reviews. However, you only get invited to do 3 reviews. In this case, there will be no penalty. Similarly, if you do not receive any review requests, there will be no penalty, as you remain willing and comply with the policy.
On protecting students and junior researchers
Q: What happens if my supervisor declares themselves as a reviewer but then does not submit their reviews? Does my paper get desk-rejected?
Under the current policy, yes – if a declared reviewer fails to fulfil their responsibility, their submission(s) are desk-rejected. For example, to clarify: Let’s say Tony submits two papers – one with Anna and one with Regan. On Regan’s paper, he has one review responsibility slot, but none on Anna’s. In this case, if he does not fulfil his review requirement, only Regan’s paper gets DR. We know this creates a structural vulnerability for students whose papers depend on the behaviour of senior co-authors. However, if Tony has one review responsibility slot on both papers, but only does one of the reviews he was asked to do, then both Anna’s and Regan’s papers will get a DR.
Just like what happens with discussions about authorship order, we expect (and encourage!) authors to discuss these responsibilities early on when working on a paper, to ensure that any eligible author blocks out time in their schedule to fulfil their reviews.
Q: How do newer researchers get into the reviewer and AC pool under the new qualifications? What does “prior mentoring or training in review writing” mean, and how will it be verified?
There are two minimum requirements to be a reviewer for CHI:
- At least one full publication in CHI or a SIGCHI specialized conference.
- Prior mentoring or training in review writing
Talk to your supervisor/line manager about which publications you should aim for during your research. Note that the requirement does not state you have to be first author on the paper. There are many SIGCHI-specialized conferences besides CHI where your work might fit.
As per mentoring or training, you can take part in the ACM Reviewer Training Course and Certification.
You may receive mentoring from a supervisor or more senior colleagues – for example, you might run an internal peer review process for paper drafts in your research lab and gain feedback on your reviews from your supervisor. Some conferences, like CSCW, have run Student Reviewer Mentor Programs in the past, or similar training experiences like the CHI 2025 course on “How to Peer Review for CHI” you can look out for.
There are recurring open calls to review for SIGCHI conferences, and interested individuals can also volunteer themselves on PCS prior to submission deadlines for SIGCHI conferences.
The qualifications are not about excluding capable researchers, but about ensuring a minimal level of familiarity with CHI’s expectations and review process. We welcome newcomers: they can participate as authors, and once they have contributed to an accepted paper and evidence of training/being mentored in reviewing, they become eligible to review. Then, when they have developed sufficient reviewing and publication experience, they can be AC. This defines a clear pathway into the reviewing CHI community, which previously was less transparent.
On subcommittees
Q: Why are subcommittees being removed? We argue they do important disciplinary work.
We have heard this concern strongly, including through the formal open letter signed by a number of community members. The argument for removal is not that subcommittees have produced no value. The data on subcommittee divergence in acceptance rates and AC experience profiles show the opposite: subcommittees have developed distinct cultures and expertise. The concern is that as CHI grows, this divergence becomes a source of inconsistency rather than strength, and that the structural overhead of maintaining fixed organisational silos becomes unsustainable at projected scale.
To be clear, our goal is not to dissolve the communities themselves. The proposal replaces fixed subcommittee structures with flexible groupings organised around Subcommunity Chairs, who will play a role similar to the former subcommittee chairs. Each SC will create its own subcommunity. The communities persist, it’s the organisational containers that change to allow for more permeable boundaries.
Q: If subcommittees are gone, how do ACs bid on papers?
For CHI 2027, bidding is being replaced by automated keyword-based matching. Paper descriptors provided by authors are matched against expertise keywords registered by ACs and reviewers, with SCs providing oversight across areas. This shift is what makes review at CHI’s projected scale workable.
We understand some may prefer bidding, as it allows ACs to express interest in specific papers. However, bidding across the full set of thousands of submissions (as a reminder, 6730 papers were submitted for CHI 2026, and we are expecting around 10,000 for CHI 2027) is unworkable. Moreover, this would expose a lot of information about the submission, creating a real risk for collusion rings.
Keyword-based algorithmic assignment ensures that papers are matched efficiently to ACs with relevant expertise. Other conferences, like ACL, have been successfully using matching algorithms. One comment on Sli.do mentioned “I get great papers to review. I’m now a fan of compulsory reviewing: it was a shock the first time but works well.”
We have outlined in a separate blog post the proposed process for matching reviewers with papers, including how we have reached this and the next steps.
On the ADR process
Q: You talked about using a rubric at CHI. The rubric is too complex for a rapid triage. Can it be simplified?
We have run two pilot tests using the rubric, and data consistently showed that triage can be done in 15 minutes. The pilots involved accepted papers, rejected papers, and borderline papers. However, we have listened to the community who were concerned about the additional burden that this would place on reviewers and developed an AI-assisted rubric-based assessment process that will assist in the process.
Q: Will any paper be rejected by AI alone?
No. Every desk reject, ADR, and final acceptance decision at CHI 2027 is made by a person. The AI-assisted tools we are piloting this year support the review process at five points: running completeness checks on submissions, matching papers to ACs and reviewers, surfacing candidate papers for desk rejects, ADR screening, and supporting ACs with identifying quality reviews. For ADRs specifically, a flagged paper is examined by the AC responsible for it, then confirmed by an SC and a Paper Chair before any notification is sent. If the AC disagrees with the tool’s flag, the flag has no further effect.
On recognition and rewards
Q: Public lists and conference mentions are nice, but will not change behaviour. Can there be material incentives?
While our plan is to introduce recognitions for reviewer efforts, we are still in the process of exploring what form this will take. We have received many suggestions, some more feasible than others. We will update on this in due course.
We welcome feedback and volunteer effort to refine reviewer recognitions.
On the process of the Working Group
Q: Why is this called a feedback session if the decisions are already made?
We have strived to involve the community throughout the work of our Peer Review Working Group, because we recognised that any changes will affect the whole community and it is important to ensure changes account for as many voices as possible. In the spirit of transparency, we have outlined the community engagement process we have followed in the last two years. This has included online sessions that accommodate different time zones, in-person sessions at CHI, and asynchronous online forms – our hope is to reach and hear from as many of you as possible. Community solicitations are usually advertised via the CHI Steering Committee blog.
Two of the five pillars (minimum qualifications and the review responsibility policy) have already been formally approved by the Steering Committee and were presented at CHI 2026 Townhall. The other three pillars (the ADR process, the streamlined review structure, and the recognition programme) were recently approved by the Steering Committee and welcomed by the Executive Committee. The timeline for CHI 2027 requires decisions to be in place, because the data shows we need to implement changes fast to keep up with the unsustainable growth of CHI. We are proposing these changes in a 3-year trial, during which we welcome feedback and refinements.