--- name: wsdm-submission description: Use when auditing a WSDM submission before the August deadlines - EasyChair setup, the abstract-then-paper week, the appendix-inclusive page budget, the required ethical-considerations section, anonymization that survives Associate-Chair metadata visibility, and desk-reject exposure at a no-rebuttal venue. --- # WSDM Submission Audit a paper headed for WSDM's single annual deadline. The stakes are unusual: WSDM historically runs **no rebuttal**, so whatever enters EasyChair in August is the entire case reviewers will ever see. A fixable-in-rebuttal weakness at other venues is a terminal weakness here. Every number below is a 2026-edition anchor (19th WSDM, Boise); reopen the current edition's CFP before quoting any of it. ## The two-deadline week WSDM pairs an abstract registration with a full-paper deadline one week later (2026: abstracts August 7, papers August 14, 2025, both 23:59 AoE, EasyChair). Use the gap deliberately: - The abstract you register steers bidding at a venue with a compact, expert PC. A vague abstract lands the paper with the wrong specialists; at a no-rebuttal venue you cannot later explain what the paper "really" meant. - Placeholder titles or abstracts ("TBD") were an explicit desk-reject trigger in the 2026 short-paper call - assume the same hygiene standard everywhere. - Author lists and orderings should be final at abstract time. Confirm every coauthor's EasyChair account and conflict declarations that week, not on deadline night. ## Page-budget arithmetic: appendices live inside the cap The 2026 long-paper rule: **9 pages including diagrams, tables, and appendices**, with unrestricted space only for references and the ethical-considerations section. The 2025 rule was 8 pages plus at most 2 shared by references and ethics. Two consequences that surprise people arriving from KDD or NeurIPS: 1. There is no unlimited appendix to absorb overflow. A proof, a prompt listing, or a hyperparameter table "moved to the appendix" still spends the same budget. 2. The only uncounted prose you control is the ethics section - and chairs read it as ethics, not as a smuggling route for extra experiments. Abusing it is a credibility hit in front of the same SPC who writes your meta-review. ```latex % WSDM 2025-cycle documented setting - verify options against the current CFP \documentclass[sigconf,anonymous,review]{acmart} % sigconf : ACM two-column conference layout (WSDM is an ACM conference) % anonymous : suppresses the author block for double-blind review % review : line numbers for reviewer reference % Never patch \baselineskip, margins, or fonts: a tampered acmart is visible % to any chair who compiles the reference template next to your PDF. ``` Budget the 9 pages backwards: fix the space for the evaluation section first (WSDM reviewers weigh it heaviest), then the method, then shrink the introduction to what remains. Cutting evaluation to preserve a long method narrative is the classic losing trade at this venue. ## Anonymization under hybrid blinding WSDM's CFP describes "a combination of single-blind reviewing and double-blind reviewing": the PDF must be fully anonymized for PC and senior PC members, while Associate Chairs can see submission metadata (including authorship) to check conflicts. Practical readings: - Do not treat AC metadata visibility as permission to be sloppy - the people scoring the paper still must not be able to guess the authors. - Industry papers leak identity through infrastructure nouns: an internal system name, a proprietary metric, a "our platform serves X million queries" figure that uniquely identifies one company. Rewrite to role descriptions ("a large commercial search engine") and round figures that fingerprint you. - Self-citations go in third person; a cited anonymous repository must have a history-free remote, no institutional paths, and no author handles in configs. - WSDM's anonymization seriousness is not folklore: the venue hosted the 2017 controlled experiment showing single-blind reviewers favor famous affiliations, and its policy is written in that shadow. ## Desk-level exposure table | Failure | Why it is severe at WSDM | Recoverable? | |---|---|---| | Over the 9-page inclusive cap | Explicit CFP bound; appendices count | No, after AoE | | Missing ethical-considerations section | Required element of the submission | No | | Identity leak in PDF or linked repo | Hybrid-blind policy with an experimental rationale | No | | Wrong or "TBD" registered abstract | Bad bidding + placeholder desk-reject rule | Only in the abstract-paper gap | | Claim answerable only "in rebuttal" | There is no rebuttal to answer it in | Only by rewriting before the deadline | | Ethics section used as overflow appendix | Read by SPC as bad faith | Only before the deadline | ## Vignette: the platform paper that fingerprinted itself A search-quality team anonymizes diligently - author block gone, citations in third person, repository scrubbed - and still gets flagged. The leak chain: the paper reports "our engine's 2.3 billion daily queries in 41 languages," names an internal experiment platform in a figure caption, and evaluates on a locale mix only one company serves. No single item names the employer; the conjunction does. The repair pass that would have caught it: - Read the paper asking "how many organizations could have written this sentence?" - any sentence with answer "one" gets generalized or rounded. - Rename internal systems to functional labels ("the interleaving platform"). - Report locale/scale details in buckets wide enough to cover several plausible platforms, with exact values deferred to the camera-ready. This is also why the audit below schedules the anonymity sweep *after* the content freeze: anonymity is a property of the final text, and every late paragraph reopens it. ## Final-week order of operations 1. Freeze scope: anything not already in the evaluation cannot be promised later. Delete forward-looking claims ("we will additionally verify..."). 2. Recompile from a clean `acmart` checkout; check the page count with references and ethics excluded from the 9, everything else included. 3. Run the self-containment pass: for each likely reviewer objection, verify the answer is physically in the PDF (see `wsdm-author-response` for the objection inventory method). 4. Sweep metadata: PDF author fields, figure-embedded usernames, dataset paths, acknowledgements, grant numbers, repository history. 5. Submit the PDF with hours of AoE margin. EasyChair accepts resubmissions until the deadline - upload early, replace often. ## Output format ```text [WSDM submission audit] Ready / Needs fixes / Blocked [Budget] 9-page-inclusive check: pass / over by N (appendices counted?) [Ethics section] present and substantive: yes / no [Anonymity] PDF / repo / metadata / infrastructure-noun leaks found: [Self-containment] objections lacking in-PDF answers: [Abstract-week actions] ```