At CHI, related work is screened before it is reviewed: ADR-Context — "grossly insufficient literature review to contextualize the contribution" — was the most frequently cited assisted desk-reject reason at CHI 2026, applied jointly by subcommittee chairs and ACs before external review (chi2026.acm.org outcome posts, read 2026-07-08). A thin or misaimed section no longer just lowers scores; it can end the submission in October.
| Lane | What belongs there | Who notices its absence |
|---|---|---|
| CHI itself, last ~3 cycles | The ongoing conversation your paper joins | 1AC/2AC — instantly |
| The HCI family (CSCW, UIST, DIS, IUI, ASSETS, IMWUT, TOCHI, IJHCS) | The specialist thread of your topic | The external recruited from that thread |
| Foundational HCI | The classic your framing stands on (or contradicts) | Senior reviewers |
| Feeder disciplines | Psychology, sociology, design, communication, health, ML — wherever your constructs come from | The reviewer trained in that discipline |
| Domain/application literature | The practice context you study (education, accessibility, health...) | The reviewer who lives in that context |
The feeder-discipline lane is CHI-distinctive and the most common hole: a paper measuring "trust" that cites no trust literature outside HCI, or one deploying thematic analysis citing only its HCI users, reads as unserious to exactly the reviewer the subcommittee recruited to check it.
The paragraph unit that survives review states a front — what the cited cluster established, where it stops, and how your work moves it:
Prior deployments of voice assistants with older adults established adoption barriers in home settings [x, y, z], but studied single-user households; multi-resident care contexts, where addressee ambiguity dominates, remain unexamined. We provide the first such deployment.
Three tests per paragraph: it cites ≥2 works in tension or sequence (else it is an annotation), it ends with a gap or relationship claim, and deleting it would weaken the introduction's contribution list. A related-work section whose paragraphs all pass is positioning; anything else is coverage theater — and coverage theater at excessive length also feeds the ADR-Contribution ground (small contribution relative to paper length).
The ACM Digital Library (now fully open access since January 2026) is the canonical index for the HCI family; Google Scholar catches the feeder disciplines and preprints.
Working queries (adapt per project):
- dl.acm.org: [Title: <construct>] AND [Conference: CHI] — filter to 2022-2026
- dl.acm.org: same construct in TOCHI + CSCW + ASSETS (the thread often lives
in a sibling, published a year before the CHI wave)
- Scholar: <construct> + the feeder discipline's own term (e.g. "technology
acceptance" vs "adoption"; "self-efficacy" vs "confidence")
- Forward-citation pass on your 3 closest papers — who cited them in the last
two cycles is your actual competitive set
- arXiv/OSF preprint sweep for concurrent work; cite-and-distinguish preprints
rather than pretending the lane is empty
Log the search date. Between September submission and the December 3 resubmission,
re-run the sweep — a five-week revision that misses a newly published near-neighbor
hands round-2 reviewers a free objection (chi-author-response).
When a close paper exists (it does), CHI reviewers expect precise, generous differentiation: name the axis of difference — population, setting, method, theoretical lens, system capability — and what your position on that axis newly shows. Dismissive comparisons ("however, they only...") backfire in a community small enough that the neighbor may be your external reviewer.
CHI review is anonymized but your prior work is often the nearest neighbor. The
standing convention: cite yourself in the third person ("Building on the probe
deployed by [12]...") and never write "our previous study." Omitting your own
essential prior paper is worse than citing it — reviewers who find it later infer
concealment. Anonymize the prose, not the record. Link hygiene (no named
repositories in citations) is covered in chi-submission.
[Lane audit] CHI-recent: <n cited> · HCI-family: <n> · foundational: <n> ·
feeder: <n> · domain: <n> — weakest lane: <which>
[Positioning test] paragraphs passing front-gap-relevance: <n>/<n>
[Nearest neighbors] <3 papers + the axis distinguishing each>
[Concurrent work] preprint sweep date: <date> — hits handled: yes/no
[Self-citation] third-person clean: yes/no
[ADR-Context exposure] low / medium / high — <reason>