webconf-topic-selection

Web Conference Topic Selection

Two decisions, in order: is the work web-native, and **which track's reviewer

pool should judge it**. Both are made by the authors, both are effectively

irreversible at the deadline, and the second is as consequential as the first

because the venue reviews inside tracks.

Decision 1: the web-nativeness test

Ask: *if the Web's specific structure disappeared, would this contribution still

make sense?* Web-native work depends on at least one of: open hypertext and link

structure; platform mechanics and incentives; live, adversarial, user-generated

content; web-scale heterogeneity; or the socio-technical coupling of users and

algorithms. A generic model that merely evaluates on a web dataset fails the

test — the dataset is swappable, so an ML venue's pool serves it better.

Web-native?                                  -> route
  Contribution needs link/platform/user      -> Web Conference candidate; go to
  structure to exist                            Decision 2
  Contribution is a general method; web      -> NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR or KDD, cite
  data is one evaluation among many             web results as evidence
  Contribution is about people/society,      -> ICWSM or WebSci if measurement/
  computation is instrumental                   interdisciplinarity dominates
  Contribution is retrieval effectiveness    -> SIGIR first; Web Conference if the
  per se                                        open-web setting changes the problem
  Contribution is mining methodology with    -> WSDM (methods-first) or KDD
  modest web specificity                        (mining/deployment-first)
  Contribution is a deployed web system's   -> Web Conference Industry track, not
  practice lessons                              the research tracks

Decision 2: track fit (2026 lineup)

The 2026 research tracks, with the question each pool is primed to ask:

| Track (2026) | The pool's primary question |

|---|---|

| Economics, online markets and human computation | Are incentives/welfare modeled, not just predicted? |

| Graph algorithms and modeling for the Web | Does the graph method respect web-graph properties? |

| Responsible Web | Are harms, fairness, or governance the contribution? |

| Search and retrieval-augmented AI | What beats strong current retrieval/RAG baselines? |

| Security and privacy | Is there a real threat model and adversary? |

| Semantics and knowledge | Does it advance KGs/ontologies/structured data on the web? |

| Social networks and social media | Is the social measurement or model construct-valid? |

| Systems and infrastructure (Web, mobile, WoT) | Does it hold under realistic load/deployment? |

| User modeling, personalization and recommendation | Is the personalization gain real and leak-free? |

| Web mining and content analysis | Is the extracted signal novel and robust at scale? |

Tie-breaks: pick the track whose evidence you actually have, not whose name

flatters the abstract. A RAG-for-recommendation paper with strong offline ranking

tables but no retrieval-baseline sweep survives better in "User modeling ..." than

in "Search and retrieval-augmented AI." Track names are re-cut most editions —

confirm the current list before deciding, and remember the cap: at most 7

submissions per author across all research tracks in 2026.

Lane selection inside the venue

• Full research paper (8+refs+appendix ≤ 12 pages): a complete evidence

program. The default.

• Short paper (4 pages incl. references in 2026; main proceedings): one sharp

idea with focused evidence; the later deadline (+6 weeks in 2026) is a schedule

fact, not a quality discount.

• Web4Good (2026 special track; main proceedings): work whose center is

measurable societal benefit; do not spin ordinary work into it.

• Industry track: deployment truth over methodological novelty; different

platform (OpenReview in 2026) and reviewer expectations.

• Workshops (companion proceedings): early-stage or community-building work.

The two chronic misroutes

1. The dressed-up ML paper: a general architecture with WWW formatting and one

web dataset. Track panels detect it with the swappability question, and the

review that follows ("better suited to a specialized venue") wastes a year.

Route it to the ML flagship and cite the web experiment as evidence there.

1. The homeless interdisciplinary paper: strong social-science finding, thin

computational novelty, submitted to a methods-leaning track. It needed

"Social networks and social media" (measurement-tolerant) or ICWSM. The fix is

pool choice, not more models.

Boundary cases of the current era

• LLM/RAG papers. The venue added "Search and retrieval-augmented AI" as a

2026 track, so LLM work is welcome — when the Web is load-bearing: retrieval

over live/adversarial corpora, LLM-generated content polluting web ecosystems,

agents navigating real sites. An LLM fine-tuning method evaluated on static QA

benchmarks remains an ML-venue paper wearing a web costume.

• Dataset and benchmark contributions. The 2026 lineup had no dedicated

resource track (unlike some earlier editions and unlike KDD's separate

datasets-and-benchmarks track); a dataset paper competes inside a topical track

on the strength of its measurement or enabling analysis. Check the current

edition's calls before assuming either way.

• Web3/blockchain, WoT, and mobile. In 2026 these lived inside "Systems and

infrastructure for Web, mobile, and WoT" and the economics track rather than as

standalone tracks — evidence expectations follow the host track, not the

subfield's own conferences.

• Ethics-centered work. If harms analysis is the contribution, "Responsible

Web" is the pool primed for it; if harms are one section of a methods paper,

stay in the methods track and let the ethics paragraph do its job.

Commitment checklist

• [ ] One-sentence web-native mechanism written (it becomes page 1 —

webconf-writing-style).

• [ ] Track chosen by evidence held; second-choice track named in case the lineup

changes at the portal.

• [ ] Lane chosen (full/short/Web4Good/industry/workshop) with the calendar

(webconf-workflow) in view.

• [ ] Per-author submission counts across the team checked against the cap.
• [ ] The nearest sibling-venue alternative named, so the team knows its plan B.

Output format

[Web-native] yes: <mechanism> / no: <reroute target>
[Track] <primary> (evidence basis); fallback <secondary>
[Lane] full / short / Web4Good / industry / workshop
[Misroute risks] <dressed-up ML / homeless interdisciplinary / track mismatch>
[Plan B] <sibling venue + what reframing it would need>