Call for Short Papers

Papers can be submitted through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wsdm2026 (select the Short Papers track).

Submissions must represent new and original work. Concurrent submissions to other venues are not allowed. Papers that have been published in or accepted to any peer-reviewed journal or conference or workshop with published proceedings, or that are currently under review, or that will be submitted to other meetings or publications while under review, may not be submitted to WSDM 2026. However, submissions that are available online (e.g., on a preprint server such as Arxiv) and/or have been previously presented orally or as posters in non peer-reviewed venues with no formal proceedings, are allowed. Additionally, the ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism and self-plagiarism. All prior work must be appropriately cited. Please also see the ACM guide on the use of Generative AI.

Manuscripts must be submitted in PDF according to the new ACM format published in ACM guidelines (use documentclass [sigconf,anonymous,review]{acmart}). Submissions should not exceed 4 pages including diagrams, tables, appendices, etc. plus unrestricted space for references and an ethical consideration section (see below). The PDF files must have all non-standard fonts embedded. Submissions must be self-contained and in English. After uploading your submission, please verify the copy stored on the submission site. Submissions that do not follow these guidelines, or do not view or print properly, may be rejected without review.

PDF files submitted to WSDM 2026 must be anonymized: the submitted document should not include the author information and should not include citations or discussion of related work that would make the authorship apparent. Explicitly revealing the manuscript authorship will result in rejection without review. Note, however, that it is acceptable to explicitly refer in the manuscript to companies or organizations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions. The reviewers will be informed that it does not necessarily imply that the authors are currently affiliated with the mentioned organization. To support the identification of reviewers with conflicts of interest, the full author list must be specified at submission time. To support faster dissemination of scientific results, we allow submissions that had earlier versions or code posted on preprint servers such as Arxiv.org or GitHub (with the understanding that these materials cannot be anonymous). In such cases, authors should exercise extra care and should not explicitly associate their submission with such publicly posted materials.

Authors may include references to external repositories containing resources and methods, full theoretical proofs and derivations, detailed descriptions of experimental setup, hyperparameter configurations, test datasets, datasets or source code, but should only do so if strict author anonymity can be maintained. Looking at supplementary material is at the discretion of the reviewers, in other words, the paper should be self-contained as much as possible.

Wherever appropriate, the authors are encouraged to use publicly available test collections and state-of-the-art baselines, and are encouraged to share the experimental results, data, and code with the research community. In their submission, authors may refer to an anonymized GitHub repository, though this is not strictly required.

Submitted manuscripts must adhere to the ACM authorship policy. In particular, (i) each author must be the creator or originator of an idea in the work; (ii) each author must make substantial contributions to the work; and (iii) each author must be accountable for the work that was done and its presentation in a publication. The policy was recently updated to govern the use of generative AI tools in authoring papers.

If an author submits numerous manuscripts to the same conference, it is less likely that one has materially contributed to all such submissions. To this end, we limit the number of submissions per author to 10 maximum. If more than 10 manuscripts are submitted with the same person listed as an author, the additional manuscripts submitted after the initial 10 will be rejected without review.

Each manuscript will be reviewed by at least three PC members and a senior PC member. The acceptance decisions will take into account manuscript novelty, technical depth, elegance, practical or theoretical impact, and presentation. WSDM 2026 will use a combination of single-blind reviewing and double-blind reviewing. The manuscripts will be double-blind to regular PC members and Senior PC members, but the metadata (including authorship) of the manuscripts will be available to Short Paper Chairs to check for undisclosed conflicts of interest and to help assure the integrity of the review process. Note that papers not related to the conference main theme and topics will be desk-rejected without review.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. ORCID IDs are required for all authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Submitted manuscripts should include a section on the ethical implications of the proposed research. This section will not be counted toward the 4-page limit, and should be placed before the references. In this section, authors are asked to reflect and discuss the potential negative societal impact of their work, as they consider appropriate. Examples of negative societal impact include fairness considerations, privacy considerations, security considerations, safety considerations, misuse of the technology by malicious actors, as well as possible harms that could arise even when the technology is being used as intended and functioning correctly. If there are negative societal impacts, authors should discuss appropriate mitigation strategies.

At least one author of each accepted short paper must register for the conference (either 3-day or 5-day) to present the paper at the conference in person. Each paper must be accompanied by a paper presentation fee. If you are an author presenting more than one paper, you should pay a paper presentation fee for each accepted paper, but only one conference registration (either 3-Day or 5-Day). WSDM 2026 will be an in-person conference, with no provisions for remote presentations. If authors are unable to present their work for any reason, they are expected to find a proxy to present the work on their behalf. The organizers reserve the right to remove any paper that is not presented during the conference from the proceedings.

All authors and reviewers must declare conflicts of interest in EasyChair. You must declare a reviewer/author as a conflict of interest when the following associations exist:

• employment at the same institution or company, regardless of geography/location, currently or in the last 12 months
• candidate for employment at the same institution or company
• received an honorarium, stipend, or grant from the institution or company within the last 12 months (except where of a modest nature, such as reimbursement of seminar expenses, honorarium for examination of a thesis, and so on).
• co-author on book or paper in the last 24 months
• co-principal investigator on a funded grant or research proposal in the last 24 months
• actively working on any project together
• family relationship or close personal relationship
• graduate advisee/advisor relationship, regardless of time elapsed since graduation
• deep personal animosity

In general, we expect authors, PC, the organizing committee, and other volunteers to adhere to ACM’s Conflict of Interest Policy as well as the ACM’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Submitted manuscripts that do not meet the length, formatting or originality requirements, or are concurrently submitted to two venues (including manuscripts with significant overlap), are subject to desk rejection without review. At the discretion of the PC Chairs and the Steering Committee, egregious violations (including plagiarism) may lead to additional penalties such as a temporary or permanent ban from the venue and sponsoring SIGs venues, as well as an escalation to the ACM Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE). Likewise, failure of an author to disclose all COIs, or cases of a referee providing a review on a paper for which they have an undisclosed COI, may lead to similar penalties. You are encouraged to contact the PC Chairs if you have questions as to the originality conditions, dual submission, or conflict of interest policy.