thedixitjain CSCW Related Work
Related work at CSCW is not a defensive perimeter; it is where the paper joins a forty-year conversation. Reviewers here are unusually likely to be the authors of the traditions you cite, to know the concept lineage personally, and — because of Revise and Resubmit — to check in round two whether the engagement you added in round one is real.
The four literatures to braid
| Literature | What reviewers check | Failure smell |
|---|---|---|
| CSCW's own lineage | That you know the concept history (awareness, articulation work, incentive misalignment, place/space) before renaming a piece of it | "We introduce the novel notion of..." for an idea with a 1992 citation |
| Recent PACMHCI-era CSCW work | Engagement with the last ~3-5 years of the venue on your topic | A related-work section whose newest CSCW citation predates the journal era |
| Neighboring venues | CHI, ICWSM, GROUP, DIS, and TOCHI work on the same phenomenon, cited by contribution rather than lumped | Treating a CHI interface study and a CSCW practice study as interchangeable |
| Source disciplines | The sociology, organization studies, communication, or STS work your framing borrows | Invoking a social theory via a secondary HCI citation only |
Braiding matters more than coverage: a paragraph per literature, each ending in what this paper takes from or contests in it, beats an alphabetical tour.
Era-correct citation of CSCW itself
CSCW's publication record has a seam in it, and sloppy citations tear on the seam:
- Before 2017: conference proceedings papers — "In Proceedings of CSCW '96."
- 2017 onward: journal articles — "Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 1, No. CSCW, Article 31." There is no "Proceedings of CSCW 2019" for papers; a bibliography entry claiming one signals the authors have not read carefully.
- Verify each CSCW citation on dblp (
conf/cscwstream) or the ACM DL PACMHCI CSCW track; fix venue strings your reference manager guessed.
The Lasting Impact lineage in resources/exemplars/library.md doubles as a spine
for concept-history paragraphs: if your topic touches failure-of-adoption, cite
through Grudin 1988; awareness, through Dourish & Bellotti 1992; place and presence,
through Harrison & Dourish 1996; sensitive-community storytelling, through Dimond et
al. 2013; moderation at platform scale, through the PACMHCI-era trace canon.
Positioning moves that survive re-review
- Contest, don't just cite. "Unlike X, we find..." is only safe when you can name the condition that explains the difference; otherwise write "extending X to a setting where..."
- Give every neighboring-venue citation a job. A CHI citation should mark the interaction-level boundary of your claim; an ICWSM citation should mark the measurement baseline you build past.
- Import theory at the source. If Suchman, Star, Goffman, or Ostrom is doing analytic work in your paper, cite and quote the primary text; reviewers from the source discipline will notice a chain of second-hand paraphrases.
- Date your snapshot. For fast-moving topics (moderation policy, AI-mediated collaboration), state when the literature search closed — the R&R gap can span most of a year, and round-two reviewers may expect newer work acknowledged.
Self-citation under anonymous journal review
Submissions are anonymized. Your own prior work must be cited in the third person ("Building on the deployment reported by [12]...") and must not be the only scaffolding the argument stands on — a paper that cites one anonymous-adjacent thread six times deanonymizes itself structurally even with names removed. If prior work is on arXiv or a personal site, do not link it in a way that resolves identity.
Audit block
[Lineage] Oldest CSCW concept engaged: <paper, year> — engaged or name-dropped?
[Recency] Newest CSCW/PACMHCI citation: <year>; search-close date stated? y/n
[Neighbors] CHI/ICWSM/GROUP/DIS citations each given a boundary-marking job? y/n
[Sources] Primary-text citation for each imported theory? y/n
[Era check] All post-2017 CSCW refs cite PACMHCI vol/issue/article? y/n
[Anonymity] Self-citations third-person, load-bearing count ≤ 2? y/n
Re-run the audit at every R&R: reviewers who asked for missing literature will read the new paragraphs first, and they can tell insertion from integration.
Citation-form facts verified against the ACM DL and dblp on 2026-07-08.
Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → CSCW-Skills/skills/cscw-related-work/SKILL.md