Writing CHI Papers: Proposing Reviewers

When you submit a CHI paper, you have the option to propose reviewers. Use it! It has several big advantages:

1. It greatly simplifies the life of your AC in identifying appropriate reviewers (if you don't make impossible suggestions, of course — more on that later)
2. It thereby improves your chances that your AC picks one of these reviewers, rather than struggling and picking a more random reviewer based on their own gut feeling, or even using the notoriously unreliable auto-suggestions by PCS.
3. This lets them assign reviewers to your paper early, which makes it more likely that those reviewers are still available.
4. You are also helping the AC to explain to the reviewer why they invited him, which makes those reviewers more likely to accept than an unjustified "cold call" in PCS.
5. This makes it one of the best ways to improve your chances of a review that recognizes and values your contributions fairly.
6. Mind-bogglingly, it is an option that by far not all authors use, so you will have a leg up in the competition.

So what are the criteria for a good reviewer?

1. They must be fairly up to date in your area of research and be familiar with your methods
2. They must not be conflicted with you, your institution, or any of your coauthors (including your advisor)
3. They must not already be on the general committee for CHI, or any subcommittee (because then they are already overloaded with work during the review period)

But how do you go about finding good reviewers? Here's a step-by-step process. It's pretty much the same process I use when I need to look for reviewers for a paper that I was assigned as a CHI 1AC.

1. Identify the papers you are citing that are most closely related to your own research. Focus on papers that were published as recently as possible.
2. Note the last name (typically the lab director / senior advisor) and the first name (typically the PhD student who did the majority of the work).
3. If the paper you are citing is older than a year or two, check their home pages and Google Scholar records to see if they have recently continued to publish in that area, or completely left it behind. This can often happen for the advisor if the paper is a few years old.
4. For the PhD student, check if they have since left academia (again, use Google, their homepage, and/or platforms like LinkedIn). If so, they may be less likely to still be interested in reviewing and up-to-date on the topic.
5. If all looks good, you now have the names of two researchers who should know the field at least as well as you do.
6. Check if either of them is conflicted with you, your co-authors (including your advisor!), or your institution. ACM considers coauthored publications in the last 2 years as an automatic conflict of interest, for example. There are more examples; read the ACM Conflict of Interest guidelines.
7. Check if either of them is already on any duty in the general conference committees (like General Chair, Program Chair, etc.)
8. If both names are still eligible, prefer the last author; their seniority usually leads to a more balanced and fair review. Otherwise, go with the first author.

There are always cases in which researchers have to decline a review for good reasons — time constraints, sabbaticals, too many other accepted reviews, etc. Therefore, it is likely that your AC will have to approach at least three or four people until they have filled their two slots for external reviewers. For that reason, suggest at least four reviewers this way. Since ACs will not assign two reviewers from the same institution to ensure a balanced review, your suggestions should come from four different institutions.

Once you've found your suggestions, you need to communicate them to the AC. You want to make sure that the AC understands how and why you selected them. So start your suggestions as follows:

The following reviewers (sorted by best match first) are experts in the topic of our work, they are not conflicted with any of the authors, and they are not members of the current CHI PC or ACs in any subcommittee:

Then you list each reviewer and explain why you suggest them specifically. Provide line number(s) to help the AC find where in your paper (typically somewhere in Related Work) the link to that person is. Sort reviewers by how good a match they are for your paper, so that the AC can work from your list top to bottom. For example:

1. John Appleseed: last author of the CHI'24 dark pattern taxonomy paper [17] that our work builds on (see line 217ff).
2. ...

Sometimes, you will also have suggestions for a reviewer who is not in your listed references. Usually, those people are very well known in the community for their expertise in their field, like Stephen Brewster for mobile interactions. But those people are often senior researchers and approached for reviews by many ACs (if they aren't already an AC themselves). So, usually, reviewers found via your references are your best bet. 

Jan Borchers has been a full professor in HCI at RWTH Aachen University since 2003, after teaching at Stanford University and ETH Zurich. He sent his first paper to CHI'97, where, miraculously, it got accepted. Since then, he has published around 40 archival papers at CHI, including numerous award-winning papers. He has been an Associate Chair (AC) on the CHI Program Committee for more than 10 years, and he introduced the Interactivity demo format to CHI in 2005. With his lab, Jan works on technical HCI research contributions ranging from interactive textiles, soft robots, personal fabrication, and electronics, to interaction techniques for AR and VR, to deceptive pattern countermeasures.