Wsdm Topic Selection

WSDM Topic Selection

Decide if a project is WSDM-shaped before anyone formats a page. WSDM (pronounced "wisdom") is deliberately narrow: search and data mining on the Web and the Social Web, run as a small, highly selective, traditionally single-track winter meeting jointly sponsored by four ACM SIGs (SIGIR, SIGKDD, SIGMOD, SIGWEB). The sponsorship list is the scope diagram - the venue lives at the intersection of retrieval, mining, data management, and the web itself.

The two-gate test

Gate 1 - the data gate. Is the primary object of study web or social-web data: queries and clicks, documents and links, user-item interactions, social graphs, ads, reviews, conversational sessions? A method paper whose experiments merely include a web dataset fails this gate; the web data must be what the contribution is about. Tabular-ML, vision, and generic NLP work fail here regardless of quality.

Gate 2 - the "practical yet principled" gate. The series describes its emphasis as practical yet principled approaches, and the PC enforces both adjectives:

• Practical: plausible at platform scale, aware of serving cost, evaluated on realistic interaction data.
• Principled: a nameable mechanism, bias-aware evaluation, and an explanation of why it works - not a leaderboard delta.

Projects strong on one adjective route elsewhere: principled-only theory toward theory-friendly venues, practical-only system reports toward industry tracks or applied venues.

Scope coverage check (2026 CFP areas)

The 2026 call organized scope roughly as: web search (including query analysis, evaluation, user behavior and log analysis, and explicitly "Search with Foundation Models"); web mining and content analysis (including recommender systems, crawling/indexing); social networks (link prediction, community detection, computational social science, influence, trust); fairness, accountability, and explainability for ranking, recommendation, and ads; and conversational search and assistants. If the project needs a paragraph of throat-clearing to sound like one of these, note that as a fit warning.

Routing table

Tie-breakers when two venues survive: (1) whose recent proceedings contain the papers you must cite - submit to the ongoing conversation; (2) whose review process suits the work - WSDM's no-rebuttal, one-in-six regime punishes papers that need explaining; (3) calendar position (wsdm-workflow maps the chain).

Selectivity realism

Anchor numbers: WSDM 2025 accepted just over 100 of more than 600 submissions (~16-17%). Single-track capacity keeps the program small by design. Honest self-assessment questions before committing the August slot:

1. Name the WSDM lineage this joins (see wsdm-related-work).       [____]
2. State the behavioral fact the paper exploits or corrects.       [____]
3. State the mechanism in one clause, no "framework" words.        [____]
4. Which quadrant of evidence is weakest (wsdm-experiments)?       [____]
5. Would the industry half of the PC call the setting realistic?   [____]
6. Is there a reason to *choose* this paper, not just no flaw?     [____]

Blank boxes at question 1-3 usually mean the project is a neighbor-venue paper wearing WSDM formatting. A weak answer at 6 with strong answers elsewhere suggests the short-paper track (since 2026) over the long track.

Routing vignettes (fictional)

• A contrastive-learning objective evaluated on MovieLens and two vision benchmarks. Fails Gate 1 - web data is a test case, not the object. Route to the ML flagships; return to WSDM only if a version emerges whose claims are about interaction data specifically.
• A measurement study of coordinated inauthentic amplification on a microblog platform, with a detection heuristic. Passes Gate 1; Gate 2 depends on the mechanism. If detection is principled and evaluated for ranking/mining impact, WSDM fits; if the contribution is the social phenomenon itself, ICWSM's review culture will value it higher.
• An LLM-based relevance judge replacing crowd labels, validated against human judgments on public query sets. Passes both gates via the evaluation lineage; equally at home at SIGIR - apply tie-breaker (1): wherever the papers it must cite appeared last two years.
• A vector-database sharding scheme with a web-corpus benchmark. The contribution is data management; the web corpus is incidental. VLDB-family first, WSDM only with a retrieval-behavior angle.

Foundation-model-era fit

LLM work is in scope only through the web lens - the 2026 CFP names "Search with Foundation Models" and the 2026 Industry Day theme was LLMs and agentic AI in industrial settings. The test: does the contribution concern how foundation models interact with web-scale search, recommendation, or user behavior (retrieval-augmentation for search, LLM-based ranking or judgment, agentic browsing, synthetic-content effects on ranking ecosystems)? A prompt technique evaluated on static QA benchmarks fails Gate 1 regardless of the word "search" in its title.

Output format

[Gate 1] web/social data is the object of study: pass / fail (reason)
[Gate 2] practical + principled both present: pass / weak adjective named
[Scope area] 2026-CFP area matched: <area or none>
[Routing] WSDM / <neighbor> with tie-breaker rationale
[Track] long / short / demo / cup / defer a year
[Confidence] choose-this-paper reason in one sentence

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → WSDM-Skills/skills/wsdm-topic-selection/SKILL.md