Call for Papers

All deadlines are 11:59 pm anywhere on earth.
*Due to the recent outage on the webpage, we are extending the deadline for abstract submissions by 48 hours, to Friday August 9.

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

Algorithms for web-scale search; Adversarial search; Search user interfaces and interaction; Distributed search, metasearch, peer-to-peer search; Local and mobile search; Multimedia web search, cross-lingual search; Query analysis and query processing; Search benchmarking and evaluation; Search user behavior and log analysis; Search with Foundation Models

Crawling and indexing web content; Web recommender systems and algorithms; Clustering, classification, and summarization of web data; Data, entity, event, and relationship extraction; Knowledge acquisition and automatic construction of knowledge bases; Large-scale graph analysis; Semantic search, faceted search, and knowledge graphs; Multimodal data mining; Scalable algorithms for mining web data; Opinion mining and sentiment analysis; Web traffic and log analysis; Web measurements, web evolution, and web models.

Algorithms for web-scale search; Adversarial search; Search user interfaces and interaction; Distributed search, metasearch, peer-to-peer search; Local and mobile search; Multimedia web search, cross-lingual search; Query analysis and query processing; Search benchmarking and evaluation; Search user behavior and log analysis; Search with Foundation Models

Fairness and accountability in ranking, recommendations and advertising; Explainability in web systems; Model and algorithm transparency; Interpretable models of individual and social behavior; Web search and data mining under privacy constraints; Fairness and interpretability in applications of web mining for social good.

Link prediction and community detection; Social network analysis and graph algorithms; Computational social science; Influence and viral marketing in social networks; Social sensing; Searching social and real-time content; Social network dynamics; Sampling, experiments, and evaluation in social networks; Social media analysis: blogs and friendship networks; Social network analysis, theories, models and applications; Social reputation and trust.

Voice search, conversational search, and dialog systems; Personal assistants, dialogue models, and conversational interaction; Task-driven search; Zero-query and implicit search.

Collaborative search and question answering; Human-in-the-Loop and Collaborative Human-AI systems.

Mental health and well-being support systems; Web mining for social good; Systems and algorithms for urban applications such as smart cities/buildings/etc; Online education systems; Monitoring and prevention of epidemics; Social chatbots.

Systems and algorithms for monitoring and detection of misinformation and fake news; Prevalence and virality of misinformation; Misinformation sources and origins; Source and content credibility; Detecting and combating spamming, trolling, aggression, dog whistles, and toxic online behaviors; Methods for detecting and mitigating low quality and offensive content, bullying and hate speech; Polarization, extremism and radicalization; Echo chambers and filter bubbles.

Use of large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models for web search and data mining, including but not limited to the following tasks: Generative question answering; Indexing and query analysis; Pre-training and self-supervised learning for web-based tasks; Development of new user interfaces and user experiences; Support to information integrity.

Papers can be submitted through CMT: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/WSDM2025

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 2025. 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. Please also see the ACM guide on the use of Generative AI. 

Manuscripts must be submitted in PDF according to the new ACM format published in ACM guidelines (use documentclass[sigconf,anonymous,review]{acmart}). Submissions should not exceed eight pages including any diagrams or tables, plus up to two additional pages for references and discussion of ethical considerations. 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 submission 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 2025 must be anonymized: the submitted document should not include the author information and should not include citations or discussion of related work that would make the authorship apparent. Explicitly revealing the manuscript authorship will result in rejection without review. Note, however, that it is acceptable to explicitly refer in the manuscript 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 the identification of reviewers with conflicts of interest, the full author list must be specified at submission time. To support faster 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 anonymous). In such cases, authors should exercise extra care and should not explicitly associate their submission with such publicly posted materials.

Authors may submit supplementary material (up to 100MB compressed in .zip format) containing full theoretical proofs and derivations, detailed descriptions of experimental setup, hyperparameter configurations, test datasets, or pointers to external repositories with datasets or source code, but should only do so if strict author anonymity can be maintained. Looking at supplementary material is at the discretion of the reviewers, in other words, the paper should be self-contained as much as possible. In CMT, the option to add supplementary material will appear only after the main paper has been submitted.

The resources and methods used within a manuscript should be described as completely as possible, in other words, the submitted 8+2 pages paper should be as self-contained as possible. Authors may submit supplementary material (up to 100MB compressed) containing detailed descriptions of experimental setup, hyperparameter configurations, test datasets or pointers to external repositories with 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 manuscript, 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.

Submitted manuscripts must adhere to the ACM authorship policy. In particular, (i) each author must be the creator or originator of an idea in the work; (ii) each author must make substantial contributions to the work; and (iii) each author must be accountable for the work that was done and its presentation in a publication. The policy was recently updated to govern the use of generative AI tools in authoring papers. 

If one submits numerous manuscripts 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 manuscripts are submitted with the same person listed as an author, the additional manuscripts 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.

Each manuscript will be reviewed by at least three PC members and a senior PC member. The acceptance decisions will take into account manuscript novelty, technical depth, elegance, practical or theoretical impact, and presentation. WSDM 2025 will use a combination of single-blind reviewing and double-blind reviewing. The manuscripts will be double-blind to regular PC members, but the metadata (including authorship) of the manuscripts will be available to SPC to check for undisclosed conflicts of interest and to help assure the integrity of the review process.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. ORCID IDs are required for all authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Submitted manuscripts should include a section on the ethical implications of the proposed research. This section will not be counted in the eight-page limit, and it should appear in the two additional pages together with the references. In this section, authors are asked to reflect and discuss the potential negative societal impact of their work, as they consider appropriate. Examples of negative societal impact include fairness considerations, privacy considerations, security considerations, safety considerations, misuse of the technology by malicious actors, as well as possible harms that could arise even when the technology is being used as intended and functioning correctly. If there are negative societal impacts, authors should discuss appropriate mitigation strategies.

In case of acceptance, at least one of the authors for the paper must register for the conference. WSDM 2025 will be an in-person conference, with no provisions for remote presentations. If authors are unable to present their work for any reason, they are expected to find a proxy to present the work on their behalf. The organizers reserve the right to remove any paper that is not presented during the conference from the proceedings.

The 10 best papers considered by The WSDM 2025 Best Paper Award Committee will be considered to be published in TIST (ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems). The guest editors consist of the best paper award committee chair and the 3 PC chairs.

All authors and reviewers must declare conflicts of interest in CMT. 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.

Submitted manuscripts that do not meet the length, formatting or originality requirements, or are concurrently submitted to two venues (including manuscripts 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, as well as an escalation to the ACM Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE). 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.

Submissions to WSDM2025 are now open via CMT. Authors are invited to submit their abstracts by August 7 and full papers by August 14.

The deadline for applying for PC membership has passed.

We welcome requests to become part of the PC committee. However, in order to minimize the communication to our PC chairs please make sure to only reach out to them if you satisfy the following criteria:

• You have had at least 5 years of experience as a researcher
• You have served as a reviewer for WSDM or related conferences (WSDM, WWW, SIGIR, KDD, CIKM, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, and equivalents)

If you do satisfy this criteria, please reach out to wsdm-2025-pc-chairs@googlegroups.com.