TL;DR: The 2026 CHI Papers track will add an Assisted Desk Reject step to its review process, collaboratively performed by SCs and ACs, with four additional Desk Reject criteria.
As we look ahead to CHI 2026 in beautiful Barcelona, we’re thrilled by the incredible enthusiasm and energy that continue to define our community. Year after year, CHI grows—not only in attendance and scope but also in the number of submissions we receive. This is a testament to our field’s strength, diversity, and relevance. CHI 2025 already saw a record increase in the number of completed submissions: 5,014, a 24% increase from 2024, and a 58% increase from 2023. At its heart, peer review is a collective effort. We are very proud of our reviewing culture. We all love submitting our papers to conferences like CHI 2026 because we know that, even if the outcome is not what we hoped, the feedback we receive is often of great value. Our programme committees and reviewers volunteer an incredible amount of time and effort to allow for great scientific programs and, in general, a thriving scientific community.
As submission numbers grow, we risk two outcomes—both of which are profoundly undesirable:
- A diluted review process, where overloaded reviewers provide rushed or superficial assessments, or (even worse)
- A collapse in reviewer recruitment, where the community simply cannot provide enough qualified people to evaluate each paper with the necessary care.
Neither option serves the values of CHI or the researchers who contribute to it, and poor peer review outcomes can harm science and the careers of scientists. Therefore, we are going to strengthen the CHI review process by introducing an Assisted Desk Reject steps.
CHI 2026 – Introducing the Assisted Desk Reject step
To allow for a reduction of the overall review workload, we will update the Desk Reject (DR) process in CHI 2026 with a set of additional criteria that would judge “a paper is out of scope or so far from acceptable as to make external reviews unnecessary”, as granted by the ACM guidelines for Evaluation of Submissions. We list these new criteria below. We recognize that these new criteria would require more time and care to check, compared to the existing DR criteria, such as anonymization issues or wrong formatting. Therefore, we are adding an “Assisted Desk Reject” (ADR) step in the review process, where SCs will flag ADR candidates during their usual DR check, and ACs will give a more in-depth read and collaboratively make the DR decision (all DR decisions will go through Paper Chairs for a final assessment).
You may recognize that these ADR criteria share similarities with those of Quick Reject (QR), which was performed by ACs prior to CHI 2024. For a while, CHI kept DR and QR as two separate processes to separate the “quick decisions” that can be performed solely by SCs and those that would require more careful reading and collaborative judgment. Based on feedback from the community, we are consolidating all these criteria as a DR that can be initiated by SCs to improve process consistency and AC workload, while still ensuring due diligence required to make the DR decisions with AC input. Specifically, the updated DR process will be carried out by the following steps:
- SCs check papers for DR and flag papers that are ADR candidates. For papers that fit the regular “quick check” DR criteria and would not need AC input, SCs will submit the DR decisions to the Paper Chairs at this point.
- 1AC checks their assigned papers for further DR decisions, by paying special attention to those ADR candidates flagged by SCs. 1AC can propose to DR or decide to keep the flagged paper in the review pool. In this step, 1AC can also identify additional DR candidates that were missed by SCs.
- 1AC then brings their DR candidates to 2AC. If the two agree in proposing a DR, the paper is then discussed with the corresponding SCs. If there is no objection, this paper will be brought to the Papers Chairs for a final assessment.
- For DR papers that went through the ADR step, 1AC will write a sufficient and constructive meta review detailing why this paper is being desk rejected. For the regular DR papers, authors will receive a brief justification from the SCs, as in the past years.
How is an Assisted Desk Reject Determined?
As described above in the new DR process, Assisted Desk Reject is NOT easily determined by a quick read, nor by a single person, but a collaborative decision by the ACs, subcommittee chairs, and paper chairs, striving for consistency and clarity, applying the best possible expert judgment while accounting for the necessity of keeping the number of reviewed submissions to a manageable level. While we separate the newly added ADR criteria and existing “regular” DR criteria that we kept mostly from CHI 2025 below, SCs and ACs will be encouraged to check all of them holistically.
The newly added Assisted Desk Reject criteria:
- Grossly insufficient literature review to contextualize and/or evaluate the proposed novelty/contribution to HCI. This is not to say that all papers must cite other CHI papers, but papers should cite scholarly literature that relates to HCI in some way.
- Grossly insufficient details provided to demonstrate research and methodological transparency and clarity, including insufficient conceptual or argumentative clarity and/or insufficient recounting of methodology.
- Grossly insufficient data to validate the analysis to support the claim.
- HCI contribution is much too small given the length of the submitted paper: a full paper making a very small contribution may be desk rejected, as paper length should be commensurate with the size of the contribution.
For Reference, regular Desk Reject criteria (primarily assessed by the subcommittee chairs):
- Incomplete submissions. For example, papers with obvious placeholder titles and/or abstracts at the abstract/metadata submission deadline, as well as papers that end abruptly and are obviously incomplete.
- The paper lacks anonymization.
- Leaving the author names in the paper or having a description or an acknowledgements section that reveals authors or the institution (e.g., places where user studies were conducted and specific supporting grant information).
- Not following anonymization guidelines such that deanonymization is obvious.
- Failure to declare concurrent submissions that are closely related.
- If you have such a submission, you must include an anonymized version of that submission as a concurrent submission within PCS. The same rule applies if your submission is built directly on a project described in a paper that is currently under review or in press at other venues.
- Failure to declare and/or cite authors’ prior publications that are closely related to the submission.
- Make sure you cite your prior publications by following our Anonymization Policy.
- Use of wrong submission formats.
- All submissions must use the template specified in the Call for Submissions page. Note that CHI has used the single-column format since 2021. Any submissions with other templates, including double-column and extended abstracts, will be desk rejected.
- Clearly out of scope for the conference (e.g., formal methods for interstellar microcontrollers).
- Not written in English.
- Obviously not a conference paper (e.g., patent disclosure, popular press article, a complete book, phd thesis, undergraduate report).
- Something is so broken in the paper that it makes it impossible to review.
- Excessively long papers without strong, clear justifications.
- Paper that is clearly unfinished or very sloppy: lots of typos, missing sections, missing references, formatting issues (including large white spaces).
- Paper that violates ACM policy on Plagiarism.
- Paper that violates CHI policy on LLM use.
What This Means for Authors
If you plan to submit to CHI 2026, we urge you to:
- Read the call for papers carefully and ensure your submission is a good fit for the venue.
- Follow formatting and submission guidelines closely—we cannot afford to spend valuable review time on papers that ignore basic requirements.
- Ensure your contribution is clearly stated and substantiated. We are looking for rigorous, well-articulated work that contributes meaningfully to the field.
Conclusion
This change is ultimately about care, care for the time and efforts our reviewers invest, for the efforts of your fellow authors, and care for the standards that make CHI such a vital and trusted venue for our community.
With these incremental actions, we believe CHI 2026 can maintain its excellence as it grows.
Thank you for being part of this community and for helping us continue to make CHI the premier venue for human-computer interaction research.
We look forward to seeing your best work in Barcelona,