Cscw Topic Selection

---
name: cscw-topic-selection
description: Use when deciding whether a project belongs at CSCW — is the group, community, or organization the real unit of analysis? — and running the routing decision against CHI, ICWSM, DIS, GROUP, TOCHI, and social-science journals before any drafting or platform account setup begins.
---

# 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:

1. **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.
2. **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.
3. **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:

```text
[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

```text
[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.