cscw-related-work

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/cscw stream) 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.