Call for Papers

WSDM (pronounced "wisdom") is one of the premier conferences on web-inspired research involving search and data mining. The 14th ACM International WSDM Conference will take place in Jerusalem, Israel, in early March 2021.

WSDM is a highly selective conference that includes refereed full papers as well as invited talks. WSDM publishes original, high-quality papers related to search and data mining on the Web and the Social Web, with an emphasis on practical yet principled approaches.

Original papers emphasizing novel algorithmic approaches are particularly encouraged. Application-oriented papers that make innovative technical contributions to research are welcome. Visionary papers on new and emerging topics are particularly encouraged.

Authors are explicitly discouraged from submitting papers that do not clearly present their contribution with respect to previous works, that contain only incremental results, and that do not provide significant advances over existing approaches.

List of Topics

WSDM proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library. We invite papers in the areas below, with example topics listed for each area.

Authors are explicitly discouraged from submitting papers that do not clearly present their contribution with respect to previous works, that contain only incremental results, and that do not provide significant advances over existing approaches.

Submission Guidelines

Originality of Submissions

Submissions must represent new and original work. Concurrent submissions are not allowed. Papers that have been published in or accepted to any peer-reviewed journal or conference or workshop with published proceedings, or that are currently under review, or that will be submitted to other meetings or publications while under review, may not be submitted to WSDM 2021. However, submissions that are available online (e.g., on a preprint server such as Arxiv) and/or have been previously presented orally or as posters in non peer-reviewed venues with no formal proceedings, are allowed. Additionally, the ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism and self-plagiarism. All prior work must be appropriately cited.

Format of Submissions

Papers must be submitted in PDF according to the new ACM format published in ACM guidelines, selecting the generic "sigconf" sample. Submissions should not exceed eight pages including any diagrams or appendices, plus up to one additional page of references. The PDF files must have all non-standard fonts embedded. Submissions must be self-contained and in English. After uploading your submission, please verify the copy stored on the Easychair site. Submissions that do not follow these guidelines, or do not view or print properly, may be rejected without review.

PDF files submitted to WSDM 2021 must be double-blind: the submitted document should not include author information and should not include citations or discussion of related work that would make the authorship apparent. Explicitly revealing the paper authorship will result in rejection without review. Note, however, that it is acceptable to explicitly refer in the paper to companies or organizations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions. To this end, instead of stating, for instance, that an experiment “was conducted on the logs of a major search engine”, the authors should refer to the search engine by name. The reviewers will be informed that it does not necessarily imply that the authors are currently affiliated with the mentioned organization. To support identification of reviewers with conflicts of interest, the full author list must be specified at submission time. To support rapid dissemination of scientific results, we allow submissions that had earlier versions or code posted on preprint servers such as Arxiv.org or GitHub (with the understanding that these materials cannot be considered double-blind). In such cases, authors should exercise extra care and should not explicitly associate their submission with such publicly posted materials.

Authorship

We believe that the listed authors should have significant involvement with each paper bearing their name. If one submits numerous papers to the same conference, it is less likely that one has materially contributed to all such submissions. To this end, we limit the number of submissions per author to 10 maximum. If more than 10 papers are submitted with the same person listed as an author, the additional papers submitted after the initial 10, will be rejected without review.

Only in exceptional cases will the PC Chairs grant permission for modifications to be made to the author list of a paper once it has been submitted and accepted.

Review Process

Each paper will be reviewed by at least three PC members and a senior PC member. The acceptance decisions will take into account paper novelty, technical depth, elegance, practical or theoretical impact, and presentation. WSDM 2021 will use a combination of single-blind reviewing and double-blind reviewing. The papers will be double-blind to regular PC members, but the metadata (including authorship) of the papers will be available to SPC to check for undisclosed conflicts of interest and to help assure the integrity of the review process.

Reproducibility

The algorithms, resources and methods used within a paper should be described as completely as possible. Authors may reference supplementary material, including detailed descriptions, test datasets or code, but should only do so if strict author anonymity can be maintained. The additional content may or may not be considered when evaluating the paper, at the discretion of the reviewers. Wherever appropriate, the authors are encouraged to use publicly available test collections and state-of-the-art baselines, and are encouraged to share the experimental results, data, and code with the research community.

Publication and Presentation

All accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library. For every paper there must be a registered author to present it in person at WSDM 2021. At the conference, all the papers will be allocated a slot at the interactive poster session to encourage discussion. Additionally, selected papers will be presented during the plenary oral sessions as either long or short talks.

Authors should note that the official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy

All authors and reviewers must declare conflicts of interest in Easychair.
You must declare a reviewer/author as a conflict of interest when the following associations exist:

• employment at the same institution or company, regardless of geography/location, currently or in the last 12 months
• candidate for employment at the same institution or company
• received an honorarium, stipend, or grant from the institution or company within the last 12 months (except where of a modest nature, such as reimbursement of seminar expenses, honorarium for examination of a thesis, and so on).
• co-author on book or paper in the last 24 months
• co-principal investigator on a funded grant or research proposal in the last 24 months
• actively working on any project together
• family relationship or close personal relationship
• graduate advisee/advisor relationship, regardless of time elapsed since graduation
• deep personal animosity

In general, we expect authors, PC, the organizing committee, and other volunteers to adhere to ACM’s Conflict of Interest Policy as well as the ACM’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Violations of Originality, Dual Submission or Conflicts of Interest

Submitted papers that do not meet the length, formatting or originality requirements, or are dually submitted to two venues (including papers with significant overlap), are subject to desk rejection without review. At the discretion of the PC Chairs and the Steering Committee, egregious violations (including plagiarism) may lead to additional penalties such as a temporary or permanent ban from the venue and sponsoring SIGs venues. Likewise, failure of an author to disclose all COIs, or cases of a referee providing a review on a paper for which they have an undisclosed COI, may lead to similar penalties. You are encouraged to contact the PC Chairs if you have questions as to the originality conditions, dual submission, or conflict of interest policy.

Important Dates

Papers Due	August 16, 2020​ (​11:59pm, anywhere in the world, Alofi time)
Notifications	October 16, 2020
Conference	March 8-12, 2021

Program Committee Co-chairs of WSDM 2021

The program chairs can be reached at: ​wsdm21-pc@googlegroups.com.

General Chairs of WSDM 2021

General questions about the conference should be directed to the general chairs: wsdm21-gc@googlegroups.com.