brycewang-stanford CSCW Topic Selection
CSCW publishes human-centered research on technology that supports or reshapes social, cooperative, and collaborative practice. The venue test is not "does this involve people and computers" — nearly everything does — but whether the paper's explanatory action happens at the level of a group, community, organization, or network. Run this decision before writing, because the framing it produces changes the introduction, the methods, and even which platform you submit through.
The unit-of-analysis test
Ask three questions of the project's core claim:
- Who is the protagonist? If the sentence "we show that ___" is completed by a team, a community, a moderation crew, a platform's user population, or an organization, CSCW is plausible. If it is completed by "users" as interchangeable individuals, you are probably describing a different venue's paper.
- What does the technology mediate? CSCW cares about coordination, division of labor, governance, trust, awareness, and collective sense-making. A faster or prettier interaction with no social consequence is not the venue's question.
- Would the finding survive a platform swap? Strong CSCW work says something about cooperative practice that outlives the specific system studied. If your contribution evaporates when the platform changes its UI, sharpen the social claim first.
The routing decision
| Signal in your project | Better home | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The novelty is an interaction technique, input method, or interface design | CHI (or UIST for technique depth) | CSCW reviewers will ask "where is the group?" and find no answer |
| Large-scale social-media measurement with no design or cooperative-work stake | ICWSM | Measurement-first culture; CSCW wants the collaboration consequence drawn out |
| A designed artifact where the argument is the design process itself | DIS | Design-research epistemology has its own reviewing home |
| Smaller-scope group-work study wanting a community conversation | GROUP | Same intellectual family, different scale and pacing |
| A mature line needing unlimited space and no conference tie | TOCHI or a social-science journal | CSCW already runs journal review, but PACMHCI CSCW papers carry a conference presentation expectation |
| Governance/harms analysis where accountability frameworks are the core | FAccT | Policy-normative reviewing culture fits better |
The CHI/CSCW boundary is the one most authors get wrong, in both directions.
Both venues accept qualitative and quantitative work about people and technology.
The working separation: CHI's center of gravity is the human-computer interaction
— capability, interface, individual experience; CSCW's is the human-human
arrangement that computing mediates. A study of how a screen-reader user navigates
a document is CHI-shaped; a study of how blind and sighted colleagues co-edit that
document is CSCW-shaped. When a project genuinely supports both framings, choose by
which literature you need reviewers to know deeply — and note that as of 2026 the
two venues differ structurally: CHI runs an annual deadline, while CSCW has moved to
rolling journal-style submission (see cscw-workflow).
Contribution kinds CSCW's own canon rewards
The venue's Lasting Impact lineage (see resources/exemplars/library.md) spans
organizational analysis, concept development, theory for design, sensitive-community
fieldwork, and large-scale trace analysis. All five registers are first-class. What
they share is not a method but a shape: an empirical or analytic account of
cooperative practice that other researchers can build with.
Weak-fit signals, regardless of topic:
- The word "collaborative" appears only in the motivation section.
- Participants were recruited as isolated individuals for a lab task, and the "group" exists only as an aggregate statistic.
- The design implications could have been written before the study.
- The paper studies a community's data without any account of the community's own practices, norms, or stakes — extraction without engagement.
Decision procedure
Run this before committing to the venue:
[Claim owner] Complete: "This paper shows that <group/community/org> ___"
If no collective completes it honestly → re-route or re-frame.
[Mediation] Name the cooperative practice the technology touches
(coordination / governance / awareness / trust / labor).
[Survival test] State the finding with the platform name deleted.
Still interesting? → CSCW-shaped.
[Nearest neighbor] Name the ONE venue you'd choose if CSCW rejected the framing,
and why its reviewers differ.
[Regime check] Confirm the current submission pathway (rolling via
Manuscript Central as of 2026-07-08) before planning dates.
Fit verdict format
[CSCW fit] Strong / Conditional / Weak — one sentence on the unit of analysis
[Cooperative practice at stake] <named practice>
[Contribution kind] organizational analysis / concept / theory-for-design /
community study / trace analysis / system
[Re-route candidate] <venue + the reviewer-culture reason>
[Framing repair] <the single change that would most improve CSCW fit>
Facts here reflect cscw.acm.org and the rolling CFP as checked on 2026-07-08; the venue is mid-transition, so re-verify submission mechanics whenever routing advice turns into a plan.