Research Tracks
Call for Papers

We invite contributions to the research tracks of The Web Conference 2022 (formerly known as WWW). The conference will take place online, hosted by Lyon, France, on April 25-29, 2022.

Instructions for authors of research tracks submissions

The Web Conference is the premier conference focused on understanding the current state and the evolution of the Web through the lens of different disciplines, including computing, computational social science, economics and political sciences. We encourage submissions that:

• present in-depth accounts and novel analyses that improve our understanding of the Web and its impact;
• introduce and evaluate technical and socio-technical systems and approaches enabled by core Web technologies, standards, and platforms;
• make strides in democratising access to web content and technologies, making it more accessible and inclusive to different audiences.

Our research interests are organised in thematic tracks. In 2022 these will be (in alphabetical order):

It is important to recall that this is a conference about the Web and how it has crucially enabled new research and applications. While the Web is part of a broader interdisciplinary ecosystem, including technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and many others, it remains a distinct scholarly field, with its own research methods, tools, and challenges. As such, submissions that merely use one or another Web artifact — e.g., a dataset or a Web API or a social network — rather than answering a specific Web-related research challenge, are out of scope of the conference and will not be considered.

In addition to the research tracks listed earlier, the conference also features a curated set of special tracks, which reflect emerging topics and trends in the community. In 2022 these will be: e-sport and massive online gaming; history of the Web; as well as Web for good, inclusiveness, and fairness. You may want to consider them when deciding if and where to submit your work.

Submission guidelines

For the research tracks, submissions are limited to 8 content pages, which should include all figures and tables, but excluding supplementary material and references. In addition, you can include 2 additional pages of supplementary material. The total number of pages with supplementary material and references must not exceed 12 pages. The papers must be formatted according to the instructions below. Papers not complying to the page limits or not following the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected.

Submissions will be handled via Easychair, at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=thewebconf2022. Please take some time to consider the most appropriate track for your work; where a paper is not submitted to a relevant track, the programme committee cannot guarantee that your paper will be matched to a more suitable one.

Formatting the submissions

Submissions must adhere to the ACM template and format published in the ACM guidelines at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. Please remember to add Concepts and Keywords. Please use the template in traditional double-column format to prepare your submissions. For example, word users may use Word Interim Template, and latex users may use sample-sigconf template.

For overleaf users, you may want to use https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computing-machinery-acm-sig-proceedings-template/bmvfhcdnxfty.

Submissions for review must be in PDF format. They must be self-contained and written in English. Submissions that do not follow these guidelines, or do not view or print properly, will be rejected without review.

Author identity

The review process will be double-blind. The submitted document should not include any author names, affiliations, or other identifying information. This may include, but is not restricted to: acknowledgements, self-citations, references to prior work by the author(s) etc. Submissions not complying to this guidance will be desk-rejected.

You may explicitly refer in the paper to organisations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions and tools. In other words, instead of saying that “we analysed the logs of a major search engine”, the authors may name the search engine in question. The reviewers will be informed that naming organisations in papers does not necessarily imply that the authors are currently affiliated with said organisation.

Originality and concurrent submissions

Submissions must present original work — this means that papers published or accepted to any peer-reviewed venue with published proceedings cannot be submitted here; also, authors must appropriately cite their prior work (considering the double-blind review policy). Finally, submissions available only online and/or that have been previously presented orally, as posters, or in venues with no formal proceedings are allowed.

Concurrent submissions are not allowed – this means that papers that are currently under review cannot be submitted to this conference; conversely, while the paper is under review here, it should not be submitted elsewhere. The programme committee is working closely with other related venues with similar review timelines to ensure this policy will be enforced.

The ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism, misrepresentation, and falsification that applies to all publications.

Authors may submit anonymized work that is already available as a preprint (e.g., on arXiv) without citing it. Availability of non-anonymous preprints will not result in a desk rejection. Reviewers will be instructed not to actively look for such preprints, but finding a preprint does not clash with our submission policies.

Ethical use of data and informed consent

As a published ACM author, 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.

When appropriate, authors are encouraged to include a section on the ethical use of data and/or informed consent in their paper.

Note that submitting your research for approval by the author(s)’ institutional ethics review body (IRB) may not always be sufficient. Even if such research has been signed off by your IRB, the programme committee might raise additional concerns about the ethical implications of the work and include these concerns in its review.

Review process

Each paper is submitted to one of the tracks listed earlier.

Programme committee (PC) members will self-declare their expertise for each paper (passing knowledge, knowledgeable, expert). Each submission will receive at least three independent reviews in the track. The goal of the review step is to provide constructive evaluation of a submitted paper. Each submission and its review will be overseen by a senior programme committee member (SPC), who will also provide a meta-review.

The submission will be discussed between reviewers, SPC and track chairs, pre- and post-rebuttal (see below). Papers will be ranked based on a range of factors including: technical mert, originality, potential impact, quality of execution, quality of presentation, related work, reproducibility of results, and ethics. Based on this ranking, track chairs will recommend papers for presentation at the conference, inclusion in the processings, and awards.

Contributing to reviews

Conferences like The Web Conference happen because hundreds and thousands of members of the scientific community volunteer to help in many capacities. This includes ensuring that the conference maintains its high standards through constructive, useful, fair reviews.

Submission numbers are expected to rise, against a background of unprecedented challenges in our professional and private lives. For these reasons, we expect all authors to be ready to give back to the community by reviewing for their track.

All authors will be considered candidate reviewers. Track chairs may invite authors who are deemed qualified reviewers to the programme committee, if there is need for additional reviewers.

Rebuttal

To inform final decisions, the Web Conference 2022 will consider author rebuttals. Authors will have the chance to provide their rebuttals in response to the reviews, mainly making clarifications and answering key questions raised by the reviewers. No additional technical contents or experimental results will be considered during the rebuttal phase. The final decision will be made not only based on technical merits but also the rebuttal from the authors where applicable.

Publication policy

Accepted papers will require a further revision in order to meet the requirements and page limits of the camera-ready format required by ACM. Instructions for the preparation of the camera-ready versions of the papers will be provided after acceptance.

All accepted papers will be published by ACM and will be available via the ACM Digital Library. To be included in the Proceedings, at least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper there.

Important dates

• Abstract submission: October 14, 2021. This is compulsory for all papers.
• Full Papers submission: October 21, 2021
• Rebuttal: December 2-6, 2021
• Notification: January 13, 2022

All submission deadlines are end-of-day in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

Programs committee chairs

• Elena Simperl (King’s College London)
• Deepak Agarwal (Pinterest)
• Aris Gionis (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

You can reach the chairs at: pc-chairs2022@thewebconf.org