CHI Club @ SIAT

What is CHI Club?

CHI Club is a peer discussion and review group to help people with their CHI paper submissions prior to submission. As a group, we’ll help each other out to get the best possible submissions.

Who can join CHI Club?

Anybody, but it’ll likely only involve people who are writing and submitting papers to CHI. It can also include people who simply want to learn more about writing CHI papers, even if they aren’t submitting something this year.

What do I do in CHI Club?

1. Submit a full draft of your CHI paper by August 31 at midnight by uploading it to this Google Drive folder. (If you use Latex, please submit a PDF file.) Edit the spreadsheet with your paper title, the contact email, author names, and file name. Why this date? This is to give you enough time after receiving back your review to think about the reviewer’s feedback. Complete papers will receive more detailed feedback so try hard to finish off your paper before submitting it to CHI Club.

2. Write at least two paper reviews for every paper you submit. To select a paper, go to the Google Drive folder and find a paper of interest to you. Edit the spreadsheet that lists who the reviewers are for the paper so not everyone reviews the same paper. When choosing papers, please try to pick ones that are within your general area of research and methodological approach (qualitative vs. quantitative, etc). You don’t want to slam a paper simply because you are inexperienced in a topic area or research method.

3. Submit your paper review by September 5 at midnight by uploading it to the Google Drive folder and emailing the author so they know the review is done. This is a hard deadline so that authors have adequate time to fix up their paper.

How do I write a review?

Write a few paragraphs that provide feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the paper. Reviews should not focus on whether it was a good idea to do the research (reviews of papers outside your area can easily fall into this trap). At this point, you also don’t want to suggest drastic changes. Good things to focus on are:

are there any areas that are confusing or hard to follow?
are there any missing details that would make it more clear to read?
do the methods make sense and are they easy to understand?
does the writing flow logically throughout the paper?
are there any grammar / spelling problems that should be fixed?

Here are some guidelines on how to write a CHI review. Here are some sample reviews from Carman. That said, at this stage, you likely don’t want to write a real CHI review. You should focus on what might improve the paper in only a week or two.

Isn’t this just going to make more work for myself?

Yes, but by giving up some of your time to review the work of others, you’ll be getting reviews back of your own work in order to make it better. You are also helping to support neurodivergent researchers, those with English as an additional language, and beyond.