Course notes from presentations given at Beijing University of Post and Telecommunication, the University of Nanjing, and Baidu in 2018

1. How to Write a
(CHI) Paper
Dr Maria Wolters
WeChat: mariawolters
Reader in Design Informatics,
University of Edinburgh
爱丁堡⼤学

2. Learning Outcomes
❖ Find the right community for your research
❖ Adapt your work so that it fits the standards of the
community where you want to publish
❖ Write your paper so that reviewers can understand
easily that you make a significant, methodologically
sound contribution
❖ Use reviewer feedback to improve your work
❖ Learn from good papers

3. My Background
❖ Editorial Board of two high impact journals:
❖ Interacting with Computers
❖ ACM Transactions on Accessibility
❖ Programme Committee, ACM SIGASSETS
❖ Associate Chair, ACM SIGCHI (Health Subcommittee)
❖ 对不起， 我的中⽂不很好。。。

4. This Lecture Will Be Interactive
❖ I will ask questions on WeChat
❖ I will invite comments on WeChat
❖ Write in Chinese if you like. WeChat has a translate
button
❖ You will analyse sample abstracts

5. There is a Textbook!
❖ Rowena Murray (2013): Writing for Academic Journals.
Third Edition. Maidenhead, UK: Open University
Press / McGraw-Hill
❖ Also check out http://chicourse.acagamic.com -
Lennart Nacke’s course (CHI Play community)

6. ❖ Remember: Everyone gets rejected! Even Paper Chairs.
❖ I reworked my first rejected CHI paper and it was
published in Interacting with Computers

7. Structure
❖ Why do you write papers?
❖ Finding and targeting a community
❖ Analysing sample papers
❖ Writing tips
❖ Reviewer feedback

8. Why Do You Write Papers?

9. Some Possible Reasons
❖ share my findings with the world!
❖ get tenure.
❖ have an academic career.
❖ be cited.
❖ get Honourable Mentions / Best Paper Awards.
❖ …

10. Activity: Why do you write?
❖ Write your answer down.
❖ Post it to the WeChat group.

11. Why Goals Matter
❖ If you want to share your findings with the right people,
you may choose a smaller, less prestigious venue.
Within CHI, alt.chi / Late Breaking Work
❖ If you need to get tenure, you need to publish in certain
journals / conferences
❖ If you need paper awards, you need to study previous
Best Papers
❖ But Best Papers are not always the most cited ones …

12. Finding Your Community

13. Example: ACM SIGCHI
❖ big conference, 25% acceptance rate
❖ chi2019.acm.org is next!

14. Two CHI Secrets
❖ CHI is not one community, it is a mix of communities. Each of
these communities has its own standards. Subcommittees of the
Programme Committee represent one or more communities
❖ Not all research on human technology interaction is suitable for
CHI. Alternatives include
❖ Human Factors
❖ Ergonomics
❖ Specialist branches, e.g. Medical Informatics

15. Activity: Who Are You?
❖ Think about one or more of the following prompts for the next
5 minutes: (from Murray, 2013)
❖ What I am interested in is …
❖ I did a couple of studies that looked at …
❖ I could do better than …
❖ I’d like to write about …
❖ The paper on … by … is close to what I would like to do
❖ Post your response on the WeChat group, if you like.

16. Example 1: Specific Applications
This subcommittee is suitable for papers that extend the design and understanding of
applications for specific application areas or domains of interest to the HCI community,
yet not explicitly covered by another subcommittee. Example application areas and
user groups are listed below. Submissions will be evaluated in part based on their
impact on the specific application area and/or group that they address, in addition
to their impact on HCI.
Example user groups: children, families, people in developing countries, employees,
charities and third sector organisations
Example application areas: education, home, sustainability, ICT4D, creativity

17. Example 2: Health, Accessibility, and Ageing
The “health” component of this subcommittee is suitable for contributions related to
health, wellness, and medicine, including
• physical, mental, and emotional well-being
• clinical environments
• self-management
• everyday wellness.
The “accessibility and ageing” subcommittee is suitable for contributions related to
accessibility for people with disabilities and/or technology for and studies involving older
adults (i.e., senior citizens).
Please add the keyword “health,” “accessibility,” or “older adults” as appropriate
to your submission in PCS so that we can be sure to direct your submission to
the appropriate subset of this committee.

18. We strongly suggest that authors review this Accessible Writing Guide in order to adopt
a writing style that refers to stakeholder groups using appropriate terminology.
Submissions to this subcommittee will be evaluated in part based on their inclusion of
and potential impact on their target user groups and other stakeholders.
This subcommittee balances the rigour required in all CHI submissions with awareness
of the challenges of conducting research in these important areas.
This subcommittee welcomes all contributions related to health, accessibility, and aging,
including empirical, theoretical, conceptual, methodological, design, and systems
contributions.

19. Activity: Which CHI Subcommittee are you?
❖ Read through the subcommittee descriptions on
https://chi2018.acm.org/selecting-a-subcommittee/
❖ Does the description fit what you do?
❖ Has one of the SCs or ACs published a paper that is
relevant to you?
❖ Post your subcommittee to WeChat. If you don’t know
which to select, post your question

20. What is Acceptable?
❖ Learn from what is being accepted in your target
community. This changes over time.
❖ What types of papers does the subcommittee cover?
❖ How do they evaluate quality?
❖ Read everything about submitting and writing papers
carefully
❖ CHI web site - everything for authors and reviewers
❖ Journals - instructions for authors

21. How to Analyse Your Target (Murray 2013)
❖ Read the full instructions for authors
❖ Read relevant titles and abstracts
❖ Skim and scan the last few years / issues. What topics occur?
How are they analysed? What types of topics are appropriate?
❖ How are the papers divided? What are typical headings and
subheadings? How long is each section
❖ What methods are used?
❖ What are the key theoretical frameworks?

22. Implications for Design
❖ CHI papers will typically have „Implications for
Design“ - what is generalisable? What can the
community learn from this?
❖ For example, what can we learn from this paper that
will help us make technology easier to use or change the
way we look at how people interact with technology?

23. What are Other People Doing?
❖ Search relevant databases:
❖ ACM Digital Library
❖ IEEE Explore
❖ Web of Science
❖ use different keywords
❖ search forwards and backwards from citations
❖ Check out other relevant communities.

24. Activity: Generating Keywords
❖ For your target work, generate your normal keywords,
and some alternatives. Check what you find in the ACM
digital library
❖ Post your experience on WeChat

25. Sample Papers

26. Sources of Sample Papers
❖ Highly cited CHI papers from the last 2-5 years in your
community
❖ CHI papers listed on the Subcommittee pages
❖ Best papers / honourable mentions

27. Activity: Find Sample Paper(s)
❖ Find a sample paper or two.
❖ Post to the group why you chose that paper.

28. Activity: What is the Gap / the Contribution?
❖ How is the literature described? deficient, open to
debate, incomplete, missing components, narrow …
❖ What is the main contribution, and how does it relate to
the gap?

29. Activity: Where is the User?
❖ How are users involved?
❖ At what stages of the research process?
❖ To what extent are questionnaires and interviews used?

30. Activity: Structural Analysis
❖ What are the headings and subheadings? How long is
each section in columns?
❖ What methods are used?
❖ What are the key theoretical frameworks?
❖ At what stage are users and other stakeholders
involved?

31. Writing Tips

32. A Summary of Your Story - Murray’s Prompts
❖ This work needed to be done because … (25 words)
❖ Those who will benefit include … (25 words)
❖ What I did was … (50 words)
❖ How I did that was by … (50 words)
❖ What happened was that … (50 words)

33. ❖ I worked out what that meant by using … (50 words)
❖ I did what I set out to do to the extent that … (50 words)
❖ The implications for research are … (25 words)
❖ The implications for practice are … (25 words)
❖ What still needs to be done is … (25 words)

34. Activity: Abstract Analysis
❖ Take your sample paper and see how and where it
addresses Murray’s prompts

35. New Writers’ Errors (Murray 2013)
❖ Writing too much about the research „problem“
❖ Overstating the problem and claiming too much for
your solutions
❖ Not saying what you mean - be very direct and clear in
your writing
❖ Putting too many ideas in one paper.

36. Observing Writing
❖ What do you say when you want to tell someone that it
is now time for you to leave? I bet you don’t say
现在我们要去 xiàn zài wǒ men yào qù (now we will go)
❖ For the full story, see https://
themandarincornerblog.com/2018/06/19/do-you-
agree-with-this-important-rule-for-language-learning/
❖ You need to analyse how native speaker authors write
❖ concentrate on UK / US / Australian authors

37. What to Observe (A Start)
❖ How do authors start a paragraph? Topic sentences at
the start of a paragraph often indicate what the
paragraph is about
❖ How do authors refer to the literature? How do they
cite? How do they say what others found, thought,
argued?
❖ What conjunctions do they use for linking arguments?
❖ How do authors refer to their users and stakeholders?

38. Clear Writing
❖ If you struggle with English, use clear, simple sentences.
❖ When translating, make sure that the words mean what
you think they mean. Look them up on bing.com to see
them used in context
❖ Be particularly careful with words that are relevant to
your key findings

39. Reviewer Feedback

40. Review Processes Vary
❖ Journal: subeditor sends to reviewers, reviewers submit
review, then it can be accept (very rare!), minor revision, major
revision, authors send revised version … with several cycles
❖ CHI: ACs send to reviewers and write meta-reviews, reviews
are discussed online and sent to authors, authors can submit
rebuttal, rebuttal is discussed online, and finally, reviews and
rebuttal are discussed within SC
❖ ASSETS: Paper chairs ask programme committee to review,
authors can submit rebuttal, reviewers discuss online

41. CHI Reviewer Guidelines
◦ Significance of the paper’s contribution to HCI and the benefit that others can
gain from the contribution:
why do the contribution and benefit matter?
◦ Originality of the work:
what new ideas or approaches are introduced? We want to emphasise that
an acceptable paper must make a clear contribution to Human Computer
Interaction
◦ Validity of the work presented:
how confidently can researchers and practitioners use the results?
◦ Presentation clarity
◦ Relevant previous work:
is prior work adequately reviewed?
https://chi2018.acm.org/guide-to-a-successful-submission/

42. Tips
❖ Review each other’s work before submission
❖ When you get the reviews, extract action points: what
needs to change? What was not clear? What needs to be
explained better, so that reviewers will understand?
❖ The AC will tell you what you need to change and
address in the rebuttal in their meta-review

43. Summary
❖ Tell a story that matters to your audience
❖ Keep it clear and simple
❖ Everyone gets rejected - learn from feedback and try
again!
Contact: Maria Wolters, maria.wolters@ed.ac.uk, WeChat
Mariawolters