wsdm-submission

WSDM Submission

Audit a paper headed for WSDM's single annual deadline. The stakes are unusual:

WSDM historically runs no rebuttal, so whatever enters EasyChair in August is

the entire case reviewers will ever see. A fixable-in-rebuttal weakness at other

venues is a terminal weakness here. Every number below is a 2026-edition anchor

(19th WSDM, Boise); reopen the current edition's CFP before quoting any of it.

The two-deadline week

WSDM pairs an abstract registration with a full-paper deadline one week later

(2026: abstracts August 7, papers August 14, 2025, both 23:59 AoE, EasyChair).

Use the gap deliberately:

• The abstract you register steers bidding at a venue with a compact, expert PC.

A vague abstract lands the paper with the wrong specialists; at a no-rebuttal

venue you cannot later explain what the paper "really" meant.

• Placeholder titles or abstracts ("TBD") were an explicit desk-reject trigger in

the 2026 short-paper call - assume the same hygiene standard everywhere.

• Author lists and orderings should be final at abstract time. Confirm every

coauthor's EasyChair account and conflict declarations that week, not on

deadline night.

Page-budget arithmetic: appendices live inside the cap

The 2026 long-paper rule: 9 pages including diagrams, tables, and appendices,

with unrestricted space only for references and the ethical-considerations

section. The 2025 rule was 8 pages plus at most 2 shared by references and

ethics. Two consequences that surprise people arriving from KDD or NeurIPS:

1. There is no unlimited appendix to absorb overflow. A proof, a prompt listing,

or a hyperparameter table "moved to the appendix" still spends the same budget.

1. The only uncounted prose you control is the ethics section - and chairs read

it as ethics, not as a smuggling route for extra experiments. Abusing it is a

credibility hit in front of the same SPC who writes your meta-review.

% WSDM 2025-cycle documented setting - verify options against the current CFP
\documentclass[sigconf,anonymous,review]{acmart}
% sigconf   : ACM two-column conference layout (WSDM is an ACM conference)
% anonymous : suppresses the author block for double-blind review
% review    : line numbers for reviewer reference
% Never patch \baselineskip, margins, or fonts: a tampered acmart is visible
% to any chair who compiles the reference template next to your PDF.

Budget the 9 pages backwards: fix the space for the evaluation section first

(WSDM reviewers weigh it heaviest), then the method, then shrink the

introduction to what remains. Cutting evaluation to preserve a long method

narrative is the classic losing trade at this venue.

Anonymization under hybrid blinding

WSDM's CFP describes "a combination of single-blind reviewing and double-blind

reviewing": the PDF must be fully anonymized for PC and senior PC members, while

Associate Chairs can see submission metadata (including authorship) to check

conflicts. Practical readings:

• Do not treat AC metadata visibility as permission to be sloppy - the people

scoring the paper still must not be able to guess the authors.

• Industry papers leak identity through infrastructure nouns: an internal system

name, a proprietary metric, a "our platform serves X million queries" figure

that uniquely identifies one company. Rewrite to role descriptions ("a large

commercial search engine") and round figures that fingerprint you.

• Self-citations go in third person; a cited anonymous repository must have a

history-free remote, no institutional paths, and no author handles in configs.

• WSDM's anonymization seriousness is not folklore: the venue hosted the 2017

controlled experiment showing single-blind reviewers favor famous affiliations,

and its policy is written in that shadow.

Desk-level exposure table

| Failure | Why it is severe at WSDM | Recoverable? |

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

| Over the 9-page inclusive cap | Explicit CFP bound; appendices count | No, after AoE |

| Missing ethical-considerations section | Required element of the submission | No |

| Identity leak in PDF or linked repo | Hybrid-blind policy with an experimental rationale | No |

| Wrong or "TBD" registered abstract | Bad bidding + placeholder desk-reject rule | Only in the abstract-paper gap |

| Claim answerable only "in rebuttal" | There is no rebuttal to answer it in | Only by rewriting before the deadline |

| Ethics section used as overflow appendix | Read by SPC as bad faith | Only before the deadline |

Vignette: the platform paper that fingerprinted itself

A search-quality team anonymizes diligently - author block gone, citations in

third person, repository scrubbed - and still gets flagged. The leak chain:

the paper reports "our engine's 2.3 billion daily queries in 41 languages,"

names an internal experiment platform in a figure caption, and evaluates on a

locale mix only one company serves. No single item names the employer; the

conjunction does. The repair pass that would have caught it:

• Read the paper asking "how many organizations could have written this

sentence?" - any sentence with answer "one" gets generalized or rounded.

• Rename internal systems to functional labels ("the interleaving platform").
• Report locale/scale details in buckets wide enough to cover several

plausible platforms, with exact values deferred to the camera-ready.

This is also why the audit below schedules the anonymity sweep after the

content freeze: anonymity is a property of the final text, and every late

paragraph reopens it.

Final-week order of operations

1. Freeze scope: anything not already in the evaluation cannot be promised later.

Delete forward-looking claims ("we will additionally verify...").

1. Recompile from a clean acmart checkout; check the page count with references

and ethics excluded from the 9, everything else included.

1. Run the self-containment pass: for each likely reviewer objection, verify the

answer is physically in the PDF (see wsdm-author-response for the objection

inventory method).

1. Sweep metadata: PDF author fields, figure-embedded usernames, dataset paths,

acknowledgements, grant numbers, repository history.

1. Submit the PDF with hours of AoE margin. EasyChair accepts resubmissions until

the deadline - upload early, replace often.

Output format

[WSDM submission audit] Ready / Needs fixes / Blocked
[Budget] 9-page-inclusive check: pass / over by N (appendices counted?)
[Ethics section] present and substantive: yes / no
[Anonymity] PDF / repo / metadata / infrastructure-noun leaks found: <list>
[Self-containment] objections lacking in-PDF answers: <list>
[Abstract-week actions] <items only fixable before the paper deadline>