chi-related-work

CHI Related Work

At CHI, related work is screened before it is reviewed: **ADR-Context — "grossly

insufficient literature review to contextualize the contribution" — was the most

frequently cited assisted desk-reject reason at CHI 2026**, applied jointly by

subcommittee chairs and ACs before external review (chi2026.acm.org outcome posts,

read 2026-07-08). A thin or misaimed section no longer just lowers scores; it can

end the submission in October.

Five lanes, all checked

| Lane | What belongs there | Who notices its absence |

|---|---|---|

| CHI itself, last ~3 cycles | The ongoing conversation your paper joins | 1AC/2AC — instantly |

| The HCI family (CSCW, UIST, DIS, IUI, ASSETS, IMWUT, TOCHI, IJHCS) | The specialist thread of your topic | The external recruited from that thread |

| Foundational HCI | The classic your framing stands on (or contradicts) | Senior reviewers |

| Feeder disciplines | Psychology, sociology, design, communication, health, ML — wherever your constructs come from | The reviewer trained in that discipline |

| Domain/application literature | The practice context you study (education, accessibility, health...) | The reviewer who lives in that context |

The feeder-discipline lane is CHI-distinctive and the most common hole: a paper

measuring "trust" that cites no trust literature outside HCI, or one deploying

thematic analysis citing only its HCI users, reads as unserious to exactly the

reviewer the subcommittee recruited to check it.

Position, don't inventory

The paragraph unit that survives review states a front — what the cited cluster

established, where it stops, and how your work moves it:

> Prior deployments of voice assistants with older adults established adoption

> barriers in home settings [x, y, z], but studied single-user households;

> multi-resident care contexts, where addressee ambiguity dominates, remain

> unexamined. We provide the first such deployment.

Three tests per paragraph: it cites ≥2 works in tension or sequence (else it is an

annotation), it ends with a gap or relationship claim, and deleting it would weaken

the introduction's contribution list. A related-work section whose paragraphs all

pass is positioning; anything else is coverage theater — and coverage theater at

excessive length also feeds the ADR-Contribution ground (small contribution relative

to paper length).

Searching the field properly

The ACM Digital Library (now fully open access since January 2026) is the canonical

index for the HCI family; Google Scholar catches the feeder disciplines and preprints.

Working queries (adapt per project):
- dl.acm.org: [Title: <construct>] AND [Conference: CHI] — filter to 2022-2026
- dl.acm.org: same construct in TOCHI + CSCW + ASSETS (the thread often lives
  in a sibling, published a year before the CHI wave)
- Scholar: <construct> + the feeder discipline's own term (e.g. "technology
  acceptance" vs "adoption"; "self-efficacy" vs "confidence")
- Forward-citation pass on your 3 closest papers — who cited them in the last
  two cycles is your actual competitive set
- arXiv/OSF preprint sweep for concurrent work; cite-and-distinguish preprints
  rather than pretending the lane is empty

Log the search date. Between September submission and the December 3 resubmission,

re-run the sweep — a five-week revision that misses a newly published near-neighbor

hands round-2 reviewers a free objection (chi-author-response).

Distinguishing near-neighbors without combat

When a close paper exists (it does), CHI reviewers expect precise, generous

differentiation: name the axis of difference — population, setting, method,

theoretical lens, system capability — and what your position on that axis newly

shows. Dismissive comparisons ("however, they only...") backfire in a community

small enough that the neighbor may be your external reviewer.

Self-citation under anonymity

CHI review is anonymized but your prior work is often the nearest neighbor. The

standing convention: cite yourself in the third person ("Building on the probe

deployed by [12]...") and never write "our previous study." Omitting your own

essential prior paper is worse than citing it — reviewers who find it later infer

concealment. Anonymize the prose, not the record. Link hygiene (no named

repositories in citations) is covered in chi-submission.

Two structural choices that read as competence

• Placement: background the reader needs before understanding the study can

come early (§2); comparisons that only make sense after seeing your findings can

legitimately sit in the discussion ("our finding extends [x]'s account..."). CHI

accepts both; choosing deliberately signals control.

• Organization: organize by intellectual front, never by venue or chronology.

Section headings like "Trust in automation," "Voice interfaces in shared spaces"

do positioning work; "Related work A/B/C" does not.

Output format

[Lane audit] CHI-recent: <n cited> · HCI-family: <n> · foundational: <n> ·
             feeder: <n> · domain: <n> — weakest lane: <which>
[Positioning test] paragraphs passing front-gap-relevance: <n>/<n>
[Nearest neighbors] <3 papers + the axis distinguishing each>
[Concurrent work] preprint sweep date: <date> — hits handled: yes/no
[Self-citation] third-person clean: yes/no
[ADR-Context exposure] low / medium / high — <reason>