Papers Track, Post-Submission Report

Increase in Submissions

CHI 2024’s Papers track has received 4046 complete submissions. This is a significant increase compared to 2023 (3,182, increase of 27%) and 2022 (2,579, increase of 57%). The chart below shows the number of complete submissions to the Papers track over the last ten iterations of the conference. The dip caused by the pandemic is visible in 2021-23. (Recall that although the 2020 conference was cancelled, the Papers track was finalized prior to the beginning of the pandemic.) A linear model has been fit to the pre-pandemic submission data and plotted along with the standard error. Although this year represents a very large increase in submissions over the last couple of years, the number received is on (linear) trend¹.

Distribution of Submissions by Author

How many submissions have individual authors made? The 4046 complete submissions were produced through the collective efforts of 12924 authors (i.e., M=3.2 authors/submission). Looking at complete submissions only, the mean number of submissions per author is 1.5 (SD = 1.4) with a mode of one. Of the 12924 authors, 9896 are authors on a single submission. The 4046 complete submissions will, if they all go to full review, require 16,184 reviews. The 100 most prolific authors have made 1155 submissions between them (i.e., generated a review load of 4620 reviews). Any author making nine or more submissions is among the 100 most prolific authors.

Requests for reviews went out last week. Each submission has, on average, 3.2 authors. Where a submission has two authors, each author will need to provide two reviews to cover the load their submission has created. A mythical average paper, with 3.2 authors, will need each author to provide 1.25 reviews. Associate Chairs will be providing a huge amount of labour to this process, meaning the effective external load is lower. However, we really do need colleagues who have submitted papers to accept reviews where they have relevant expertise. If you’re contacted by an AC still struggling to find a reviewer, please do your best to help.

Once we are deeper into the review process, we will be producing an analysis of each paper’s review `coverage’, i.e., the extent to which the authors of a given submission have contributed reviews back to the pool.

Geographical Distribution of Submission Authors

CHI 2024 has received submissions from authors in 79 countries and territories². Submissions were made from five countries in 2023 from which no submissions were made in 2024, but submissions were received from 16 countries from which no submissions were made in 2023. This means we have, net, eleven more countries represented at CHI 2024 than at CHI 2023. Here are the countries from which authors are
submitting:

In which countries are authors’ institutions based? Of the 12924 authors in total, 10908 authors (84%) have primary affiliations in one of ten countries:

Thinking about the growth in authorship again, is growth geographically even, or is it coming from particular places? Let’s look at the country data again, but this time let’s look at the data for more countries, and let’s look at the numbers for 2023 alongside those for 2024. We include a country if fifty or more authors have affiliations there for 2024 submissions. Here are the data, sorted by year-on-year growth.

It’s clear from this table that a significant proportion of the growth in authorship (and therefore submissions) in 2024 are coming from authors based in China (732 authors more in 2024 than 2023) and the USA (870 more authors, albeit from a much higher base). Of the 24 countries from which fifty or more authors have made submissions in 2024, twenty have recorded growth in author numbers and four have recorded declines. The absolute increases in author counts for all countries with authors submitting in 2024 are plotted below:

Subcommittee Load

Submissions to the CHI Papers track are made to one of eighteen subcommittees. These subcommittees have a topic focus (e.g., Health, Design, User Experience). Every subcommittee has received more submissions in 2024 than in 2023. The number of submissions to the Understanding People — Qualitative split increased by 58%. The number of submissions to the Visualisation subcommittee increased by 4%. The following chart orders subcommittees by the number of submissions they received in 2024. The number of submissions in 2023 is over-plotted to
give a sense of how the increases in submission numbers have been distributed.

Bonus Chartjunk

The review process for the CHI Papers track produces vast quantities of data. Some of this is more illuminating that others. We have tried to curate some of this illuminating data above. If you have suggestions, please do send them to analytics@chi2024.acm.org. The next post will focus on reviewing, reviewers, and how these relate to authorship. In the meantime, we leave you with two charts that tell an unsurprising story of working to deadlines:

Datatables

For data represented in this post in non-tabular form, we are currently working to make the underlying data tables interactive and accessible. For the moment, here are all results or the most recent results of each:

For the plot of submissions to the CHI Papers track over the last ten years:

For the chart showing the changes in submissions to different subcommittees between 2023 and 2024, here are the data for all subcommittees:

The data from the histograms showing the point of initial submission creation and the point of final submission are below: