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Papers Review Process

Papers Review Process

The Review Process

Like most high-profile conferences, CHI relies on a panel of reviewers to assist in the selection of contributions. Submissions will be subjected to a thorough review by four or more experts in the relevant field, including an associate chair (except in the case where your submission is desk-rejected). The process by which these reviewers are selected, and by which their assessments then influence the final decision, has been reworked and refined over the years to ensure that submissions are treated as fairly as possible. The more you understand about the review process, the better equipped you will be to make a strong case for your work. Therefore, you should familiarize yourself with this guide to the Papers Review Process and the Guide to Reviewing Papers.

To ensure the most qualified reviewers are available, you should strive to make your submissions accessible. The SIGCHI Guide to an Accessible Submission is recommended for all submissions.

Process Overview

As an ACM conference, CHI’s full paper process follows the ACM policy for “refereed” publications. The ACM policy on pre-publication evaluation distinguishes five basic levels of pre-publication evaluation applicable to all authored (that is, signed) material submitted for publication to ACM. The levels are: refereed, formally reviewed, reviewed, highly edited, and unreviewed. This year, CHI is piloting AI-assisted tools to help with matching papers to Associate Chairs and reviewers, initial screening for Desk Reject (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.

Figure 1. Flowchart showing the revise and resubmit process across authors, papers chairs, subcommunity chairs (SCs), associate chairs (ACs), and reviewers.

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.

At submission, you will provide your paper along with (a) review responsibility slots naming authors who commit to review, each with an ORCID (and, ideally, a DBLP URL), (b) paper descriptors that characterize the paper’s topic and methods, and (c) reviewing expertise on each authoring reviewer’s profile. These support the automated matching that assigns papers to AC and reviewers later in the process.

After submission, an automated tool generates a completeness report for each paper, checking that review responsibility slots are properly declared, that named reviewer-authors have valid ORCIDs, and that the paper has sufficient descriptors for keyword-based matching. You will receive your completeness reports and have a short window to address any issues before the screening check begins.

Papers that reach full review will be managed by an AC, who will act as the review manager and synthesizer. SC will provide oversight across groups of ACs, monitoring review quality, consistency, fairness, and process integrity. Each AC handles approximately 15 papers, and each SC oversees around 10–15 ACs.

Screening Check

Desk Reject

Our reviewer pool is extremely overloaded; desk rejects and assisted-desk rejects are made to save reviewers’ time and ensure that authors get notified as soon as possible so they can fix their work to send elsewhere.

Examples of desk rejects are:

  • Incomplete submissions. N.B., this includes papers with any placeholder content, as well as papers that end abruptly and are obviously incomplete.
  • The paper lacks anonymization.
    • Leaving the author names in the paper or having a description or an acknowledgments section that reveals authors or the institution (e.g., places where user studies were conducted and specific supporting grant information).
    • Not following anonymization guidelines such that deanonymization is obvious.
  • Failure to declare concurrent submissions that are closely related.
    • If you have such a submission, you must include an anonymized version of that submission as a concurrent submission within PCS. The same rule applies if your submission is built directly on a project described in a paper that is currently under review or in press at other venues.
  • Failure to declare and/or cite your own prior publications that are closely related to the submission.
  • Use of wrong submission formats.
    • All submissions must use the template specified in the Call for Papers page. Any submissions with other templates, including double-column and extended abstracts, will be desk rejected.
  • Clearly out of scope for the conference (e.g., formal methods for interstellar microcontrollers).
  • Lacking context in the HCI literature. This is not to say that all papers must cite other CHI papers, but papers should cite scholarly literature that relates to HCI in some way. 
  • Not written in English.
  • Obviously not a conference paper (e.g., patent disclosure, popular press article, a complete book, PhD thesis, undergraduate report).
  • Something is so broken in the paper that makes it impossible to review.
  • Excessively long papers without strong and clear justifications
  • Incorrect self-selected categorization at the submission time (e.g., a 12,000-word paper submitted as a short paper).
  • Paper that is clearly unfinished or very sloppy: lots of typos, missing sections, missing references, formatting issues (including large white spaces).
  • Papers that violate the ACM Policy on Authorship.

Criteria for Desk Rejection may be applied to papers throughout the entire review process, including during the revise and resubmit phase. 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, upon initial submission, the Papers chairs will run an automated screening tool to flag potential desk rejects. SCs and ACs will check flagged papers and determine whether the submission is appropriate for CHI or should be desk rejected. Desk-rejected submissions will not be assigned to a reviewer. 

In addition to these criteria, 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 fulfill their responsibility, their submission(s) are desk-rejected.

Assisted Desk Reject Phase

After basic desk reject checks, papers will enter the Assisted Desk Reject (ADR) phase. 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. The AC is responsible for deciding whether a paper receives an ADR outcome. 

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. The tool assesses the paper using a rubric based on ACM criteria (Originality, Correctness, Novelty, Importance, and Clarity of Exposition). The rubric is method-agnostic and focuses on the alignment between claims and the evidence, argument, or design work that supports them. 

For each submission where the rubric assessment suggests ADR consideration, the AC reads the paper together with the assessment and forms their own judgment. If the AC concludes the paper is a candidate for ADR, an SC and a Paper Chair review and confirm before authors are notified around October 25. Authors of not-advanced papers will 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.

Peer Review Process

The Associate Chair (AC) manages the review process for each paper and holds full authority over the choice of external reviewers. To reduce the reviewer-search burden that has historically fallen on ACs, the matching system identifies three candidate reviewers from the review responsibility pool by comparing each paper’s descriptors with reviewers’ registered expertise, and presents these as recommendations. The AC may accept these recommendations or seek out alternate reviewers whose expertise better matches the paper’s contribution. It is essential that external reviewers have sufficient expertise on the topic; the program committee reserves the right to obtain external reviews from outside the pool where needed. To handle situations where reviews may not arrive on time, an Emergency Review Board (ERB) is available to the AC. The ERB is a body of experienced reviewers who can step in during the final two weeks of the review period to supply reviews when the original reviewers are unable to complete. External reviewers will be asked to provide a detailed review of the submission and will be asked to provide a first-round recommendation among the following five choices.

  • I recommend Accept with Minor Revisions. (A)
  • I can go with either Accept with Minor Revisions or Revise and Resubmit. (ARR)
  • I recommend Revise and Resubmit. (RR)
  • I can go with either Reject or Revise and Resubmit. (RRX)
  • I recommend Reject. (X)

Once reviews are in, the AC leads a discussion with the reviewers on PCS, working through disagreements, missing considerations, and clarifications needed. SCs oversee this process across their group of ACs and determine how their subcommunity’s deliberation happens. Some may hold a synchronous meeting, others may run entirely asynchronously on PCS, and others somewhere in between. We are giving SCs a lot of autonomy in how PC meetings happen if they have their own ideas (size, time zone, synchronicity, tools). The AC’s meta-review, informed by both the external reviews and the discussion, forms the basis for the first-round outcome. Based on recommendations, papers will then fall into three groups:

Minor revisions: Any paper that receives three reviews recommending ARR or higher (A or ARR, but not RR, RRX, or X) will likely be accepted subject to minor revisions. Authors will be given the opportunity to make changes and submit a version (with tracked changes) along with an author response to the reviews. Given that the reviews are positive, this may not involve substantive changes. Authors who meet this threshold will have 4 weeks to submit a revised paper. 

Major Revisions Required: Papers that are not accepted with minor revisions, but that receive a majority of positive reviews from the external reviewers (i.e., A, ARR) will be given the opportunity to make changes and submit a version (with tracked changes) along with an author response to the reviews. The amount of requested changes will vary by paper, but all authors will have 4 weeks to respond or withdraw their paper from consideration. Papers may still be rejected in the final round of reviews. 

Reject: Papers where the AC recommends X (Reject) will be considered below the threshold to revise and resubmit, and so will be rejected. Note that the time frame for the revision process is limited to a fixed length. A submission will thus likely be rejected if the reviewers feel that the required revisions would not be achievable within the time frame. A rejection in round 1 should be taken to indicate that the work would not be ready for this year’s CHI, not that it has no place at CHI at all.

The Review Form

Here is a brief overview of the form used by the reviewers to submit reviews of your contribution. Familiarity with the questions on the review form can help you decide what to include or emphasize in your submission. If you are asked to review submissions for CHI, you will need to become very familiar with this form!

The questions on the review form ask reviewers for the following:

  • A statement of the submission’s contribution to the field of HCI; this provides the Program Committee with a basis for assessing the significance of the contribution and for judging whether all of the reviewers agree on what the contribution is.
  • An overall rating/recommendation: Accept with minor revisions (A), Accept with minor revisions or Revise and resubmit (ARR); Revise and resubmit (RR), Revise and resubmit or Reject (RRX), and Reject (X).
  • A rating of the reviewer’s own expertise in the topic area of the submission, from 1 (No Knowledge) to 4 (Expert); this helps members of the Program Committee to resolve conflicting views on submissions. We strive to ensure that no paper has multiple reviewers with a 1 (No Knowledge) expertise rating. Prospective reviewers should decline review requests if they think the expertise rating would be 1 for the submission to be reviewed.
  • A review of the submission in terms of the criteria laid out by the ACM:
    • Originality: What new ideas or approaches are introduced? We want to emphasize that an acceptable paper must make a clear contribution to HCI.
    • Correctness: How clear are the authors’ processes? How rigorous is the research (for the subfield’s definition of rigor)?
    • Novelty: Is prior work adequately reviewed? Is the current work sufficiently novel in comparison to the state-of-the-art?
    • Importance: why do the contribution and benefit matter, and how much?
    • Clarity of exposition: Is the paper clearly written?
  • Reviewers will be asked to provide a clear list of what revisions need to be made.

Reviewers can also add further comments that they want you or the Program Committee to see. 

The author’s main goal should be a strong, clear contribution to HCI. If you do this, your submission should get a high rating.

Resubmission and Round 2 Review Process

Authors of the papers with minor or major revision recommendations are invited to submit a revision of their submission, and a response to reviewers, by the resubmission deadline (see Important Dates). Note that author lists are not allowed to be changed.

Revisions should use colors to highlight the changes to the document, and also include a response letter on how the reviewer’s comments have been addressed. The authors may communicate anonymously through the submission system with the AC for clarifications. If the AC does not respond, the authors should contact the SCs. No resubmission will be allowed after the deadline. Note: authors should check all resubmission files carefully for anonymity, including that highlighted changes are not attributed to an author. Failure to conform with the CHI Anonymization policy could result in a desk rejection of the whole submission.

All the resubmissions will be reviewed by the original set of ACs and external reviewers. The AC reserves the right to invite new reviewers if needed. The results of the current review(s) and online discussions will be shared with the new reviewers in such cases. The result of the second round review is either Accept or Reject. Authors do not have a chance for another round of major revisions.