CIKM Submission

A CIKM submission clears three gates that generic conference checklists miss: an EasyChair form with consequences (track selection, reviewer nomination, arXiv declaration), a page budget that counts appendices inside it, and a named GenAI Usage Disclosure section that must physically exist in the PDF. All specifics below are the verified CIKM 2026 rules (source map, 2026-07-08); reopen the current track call and policies page before certifying anything.

Per-track budget card (2026)

All tracks: ACM proceedings template (two-column), English, PDF. Applied Research additionally requires practical-application evidence — a system launch, data release, or equivalent — as part of the claim, not as decoration.

The EasyChair form is part of the submission

• Track selection. Each track has a named EasyChair choice (e.g., "CIKM 2026 Full Research Track"); a paper filed under the wrong track competes under the wrong budget and criteria.
• Author-reviewer nomination. Every submission must nominate at least one of its authors to review for the conference, set inside EasyChair at submission time. CIKM 2026 states plainly that failure to nominate leads to desk rejection — treat the nomination as a required field, assign the most senior eligible author, and record who was named.
• arXiv declaration. If a non-anonymized version is online, or will go online before notification, that must be declared on the form. Not disclosing an existing public version is itself a desk-reject trigger — the risk is the silence, not the preprint.

GenAI Usage Disclosure section

Every CIKM 2026 submission includes a section titled for GenAI usage disclosure, placed after the main content and appendix and before the references, uncounted. It must cover generative-AI use in all stages — research design, code, data, and writing. Write it factually and specifically ("code assistants used for evaluation scripts; no generated text in the manuscript" beats boilerplate), because the conference reserves the right to run automated compliance checks against the ACM AI policy. A missing section is a compliance failure on an explicitly stated rule.

Anonymity sweep

Third-person self-citations; no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, or grant numbers; no identifying repository URLs, dataset host paths, or PDF metadata; screenshots and demo figures scrubbed of usernames and org names. For Applied Research papers this is the hard case — "deployed at our company" phrasing must stay, but the company must not be inferable from logos, product names, or traffic numbers only one operator could have.

Abstract-gate week (the underestimated deadline)

The full-track abstract deadline sits one week before the paper deadline (May 16 vs May 23 in 2026) and does more than reserve a slot:

• Authorship freezes there. The ACM authorship policy plus CIKM's explicit no-changes rule mean a collaborator not listed at the abstract gate cannot be added later — settle authorship debates the week before, not the night of.
• The track choice is effectively made there, since the abstract enters one track's EasyChair queue. Re-routing later means withdrawing and resubmitting, feasible only before the paper gate.
• Title and abstract feed reviewer bidding. In an EasyChair pool spanning three communities, a vague abstract draws the wrong lane's reviewers. Name the task, the data type, and the mechanism family so the right specialists bid — this is the cheapest review-quality lever the authors control.

Template pitfalls specific to this stack

• Use the current ACM template configured for anonymous review; stale copies from a co-author's previous ACM paper are the usual source of format drift.
• \authornote, running headers, and PDF creator metadata leak identity even when the title block is clean — check document properties, not just the rendered page.
• The GenAI Usage Disclosure and references must appear in that order after the appendix; a disclosure section placed after the references technically violates the stated placement.
• ACM class options change what counts as a page; measure the budget in the exact submission configuration, since the camera-ready configuration differs.

Sequenced final check

1. Track call reopened; budget and template confirmed for THIS track
2. Page count measured with appendices in — trim to budget, not to hope
3. GenAI Usage Disclosure section present, specific, correctly placed
4. Anonymization pass: text, figures, metadata, links
5. EasyChair: correct track selected; reviewer nomination completed and logged
6. arXiv/public-version status declared truthfully
7. Abstract gate met a week early — title/abstract/authors frozen there
8. No concurrent submission of this work anywhere else (hard ban)

Desk-reject ledger

Output format

[Verdict] submit / fix first / do not submit
[Track + budget] <track, measured pages vs limit>
[Form items] nomination: done? / arXiv declared? / track label correct?
[Compliance] GenAI section / anonymity / dual-submission
[Ordered fixes] <shortest path to a clean upload>