Matching Reviewers to Papers

Overview

CHI brings together research spanning many topics, methods, communities, contribution types, and scholarly traditions. Finding reviewers with the appropriate expertise is essential to ensuring that each submission receives a fair, informed, and constructive evaluation.

For CHI 2027, authors will no longer submit their papers to a topical subcommittee. Instead, authors will identify the expertise needed to review their paper. Reviewers and members of the Program Committee will describe their own expertise using the same set of descriptors. This information will support matching between submissions and appropriately qualified reviewers.

What Authors Need to Do

At submission, you will be asked to select descriptors that communicate the expertise required to evaluate your paper. These descriptors will cover:

• Domain:  the general area of expertise needed by a reviewer to assess your paper 
• Method or approach: the reviewing expertise needed to understand and assess how your work is conducted, including its methodological or epistemological approach.
• Users, participants, or communities: expertise needed in terms of who the work is with, for, or about, where applicable.
• Primary contribution: the main type of expertise required to assess the kind of contribution the paper makes, such as an empirical finding, system, theory, method, dataset, design artefact, infrastructure, or critique.

When selecting descriptors, ask:

What competencies within the CHI community are necessary to review this submission properly?

Choose the most specific descriptors that are important for understanding and evaluating the paper. Do not select every term that is loosely related to the work. A smaller, focused set of descriptors will generally provide a stronger matching signal than a large set of broad descriptors.

In particular, consider whether reviewers need expertise in both the paper’s topic and the way it produces knowledge. Two papers in the same domain may require very different reviewers because they use different methods, epistemological traditions, or forms of contribution. In addition, just because you might have used an LLM to build part of your prototype does not necessarily mean you need reviewers with expertise in LLMs.

How the Information Will be Used

The selected descriptors will be used alongside the paper’s content, reviewer expertise profiles, conflicts of interest, reviewer qualifications, and workload information to support the matching process.

Matching scores will help Associate Chairs identify potential reviewers. The Associate Chair remains responsible for selecting a qualified reviewer team whose expertise collectively covers the paper’s topic, methods, or approach, and contribution.

The descriptor system supports reviewer assignment. It does not rank submissions, assess their quality, determine what counts as CHI research, or replace human judgment.

For more information about why CHI has introduced this approach and how the descriptor system was developed, read “Finding the Right Reviewers: Building a New Paper–Reviewer Matching System for CHI Papers.”