Short Paper

Table of Contents

    Info at a Glance

    Important Dates

    All times are in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone. When the deadline is day D, the last time to submit is when D ends AoE. Check your local time in AoE.

    • Submission deadline: June 10th, 2025, AoE (June 11th, 2025, 14:00 CEST)
    • Notification: July 8th, 2025, AoE (July 09th, 2025, 14:00 CEST)
    • In case of acceptance: Publication-ready deadline: July 30th, 2025, AoE (July 31th, 2025, 14:00 CEST)
    • In case of rejection of a short paper – for detailed explanation see below: Submission as Work-In-Progress deadline: July 14th, 2025, AoE (July 15th, 2025, 14:00 CEST)

    Submission Details

    Submission Format

    • Submissions can be up to 6 pages long (excluding references).
    • Submissions are anonymous and should not include any author names, affiliations, and contact information.
    • Submissions can be submitted in English or German.

    Message from the Short Paper Chairs

    The Short Paper track provides the Mensch und Computer community with an opportunity to present new and exciting contributions that showcase innovative technologies, extend prior research conversations, detail short self-contained studies, or provide provocations for new work and ideas to emerge. We welcome submissions around a diversity of topics and methodologies. Examples might include:

    • An original and innovative technology, technique, or prototype with or without an accompanying evaluation
    • A short qualitative or quantitative study with a complete analysis
    • A “sequel” to a prior research contribution
    • A “prequel” to motivate or provoke novel conversations or future work
    • A theoretical or methodological contribution that provokes novel conversations for the discipline

    We encourage all members of the Mensch und Computer community and newcomers to submit Short Papers to elicit useful feedback, foster discussions, and share valuable and original ideas at the conference.

    Given this year’s conference theme, we wish to issue a particular invitation to the submission of critical and thought-provoking work that critically engages with “Digital Diversity”. 

    All Short Papers are formally reviewed and published and, as such, are archival publications.

    Preparing and Submitting Your Short Paper

    A Short Paper must be submitted via the PCS Submission System. The submission should comprise the paper itself and related metadata. It may also include an optional appendix and/or additional material. The following submission criteria apply: 

    • Paper. The primary submission material consists of an extended abstract in the ACM Master Article Submission Templates (single column; up to 6 pages, excluding references).
    • Information that is essential to the understanding of the paper (e.g., study protocol, statistical analysis, etc.) has to be included in the main part of the paper and will count towards the page limit.
    • An optional appendix in the paper file can include further information for illustrative purposes.
    • Supplementary material files can be provided via ZIP upload. The materials are not part of the main text and not needed to understand it but may provide additional details, e.g., for replication, may be included in the supplementary material part (not in the main paper). As such, these do not count toward the page limit.
    • Papers can be submitted either in English or in German. 

    Please keep in mind that reviewers are not expected to consider any additional material. They do not have to check the appendix and supplementary material to get a good understanding of the potential study, analysis, or results.

    Formatting

    Authors are required to use the single-column ACM Manuscript template. Submission preparation is described on the ACM Primary Template website. The TAPS workflow is described on ACM’s TAPS workflow page.

    For LaTex, the correct templates (Overleaf or LaTeX templates) can be found on ACM’s “Preparing your article with LaTeX” page, using \documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart}.

    For Word, the correct submission template can be found on ACM’s “Preparing your article with Word” page, i.e., “submission template.”

    Metadata Integrity

    All submission metadata, including required fields in PCS like author names, affiliations, and order, must be complete and correct by the submission deadline. This information is crucial to the integrity of the review process and author representation. No changes to metadata after this deadline will be allowed.

    Accessibility 

    Authors are expected to follow SIGCHI’s Guide to an Accessible Submission. If you have any questions or concerns about creating accessible submissions, please contact the DEI & Accessibility Chairs via accessibility@mensch-und-computer.de early in the writing process (the closer to the deadline, the less time the team will have to respond to individual requests). Papers flagged as inaccessible by a reviewer will have to be reassigned. Note that while we strive to match the best reviewer to each paper – the best reviewers for the work may not be able to review an inaccessible submission.

    Inclusivity

    Submissions should be prepared with an active consideration towards the respectful use of language, particularly towards marginalised groups, particularly around gender and disability.

    Anonymity

    All submissions need to be fully anonymised. This includes any appendices or supplemental material as well as a potential acknowledgments section. Regarding prior works of the authors, we recommend an explicit citation but avoiding phrasings such as “As we’ve shown previously…” to favour more neutral ones (e.g., “As previously shown by…”).  Reviewing will be conducted in a double-anonymous fashion, i.e., reviewers and authors are anonymous to each other. Papers that violate the anonymization policy, including within the supplemental materials or external links to datasets, code repositories, etc., will be desk rejected.

    Research Involving Human Participants

    As a researcher, you have an overriding obligation to protect participants’ welfare and safety and to ensure they are treated fairly and with respect. We recommended the following document by the European Commission on „Ethics in Social Science and Humanities“ for a wider and deeper understanding of the underlying basic ethical principles and “Research Ethics in Ethnography/Anthropology.” These include doing good (beneficence), avoiding doing harm (non-malificence), and protecting the autonomy, well-being, safety, and dignity of all research participants. Moreover, all researchers involving participants must meet appropriate ethical and legal standards as outlined in the following document: ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.

    Use of Generative Tools

    All authors should be aware of the ACM Policy on Authorship, which articulates the authorised use of generative AI in submitted works. Text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT must be clearly marked where such tools are used for purposes beyond editing the author’s own text. All authors are responsible for the content created by these tools, the use of the tools must be disclosed (e.g., in the acknowledgements), and the tool cannot be listed as an author. As such, authors are responsible for plagiarism, misrepresentation, fabrication, or falsification of content and/or references generated through the use of generative AI tools, and could be sanctioned with penalties, such as a publication ban. We will investigate submissions brought to our attention and will reject papers where LLM use is not clearly marked.

    Selection Process

    Short Paper submissions are formally reviewed through a review process and receive feedback from reviewers. The criteria for evaluation are as follows:

    • Contribution/Importance of the Short Paper to Mensch und Computer: Does this work present research contributions or ideas that will stimulate interesting conversations among conference attendees?
    • Significance: How important is the problem or question that this submission addresses? Is there an audience at the conference that would find this work influential and/or compelling?
    • Originality/Novelty: How does the work build on – or speak to – existing work in the area? Does it make a novel contribution?
    • Correctness/Validity: How well are the chosen methods described and justified within the submission?
    • Clarity: How clear, understandable, and targeted is the writing? To what extent does the submission conform to all requirements?

    The submission should contain no sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at the time of publication. All submissions are considered confidential during the review. All rejected and not-published submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity.

    For a sustainable reviewing process, we strongly encourage all authors to volunteer as reviewers via Precision Conference.

    Upon Acceptance of your Short Paper

    The publication-ready version has to follow the latest LaTeX and Word templates from ACM and the TAPS workflow. Should you need technical assistance, please direct your technical query to the proceedings chairs via proceedings@mensch-und-computer.de. Authors whose paper is written in German are required to provide an English abstract and title that accompanies the German one. Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

    Authors of accepted submissions will receive feedback on changes to be made to their Short Papers for the publication-ready deadline. 

    Upon Rejection of your Short Paper

    Papers that have been rejected in the formal review but are sound from a methodological, formal and ethical point of view and can lead to interesting discussions in the community will receive an invitation to be presented as Work-In-Progress at Mensch und Computer. In this case, the authors will be asked if they wish to present their work with a poster at the conference and get their paper submission published in the GI Library, albeit not the ACM Digital Library. Upon receiving this invitation via email and to accept this offer, the authors have to resubmit the paper before 14th of July AoE as Work-In-Progress paper (details provided with the invitation).

    At the Conference

    For each accepted Short Paper and each Work-In-Progress paper, at least one author must attend the conference in person and present a poster in order for the paper to be included in the conference proceedings. Authors will be assigned a day and time to present their poster to conference attendees. Posters should include (1) the title of the Short paper or Work-In-Progress, the authors’ names, and affiliations, (2) a concise overview of the research, (3) clear illustrations of key aspects of the Short Papers or Work-In-Progress, and (4) a compelling visual design. Posters might also include QR codes to link to online materials (e.g., scenario videos, and interactive prototypes). At the conference, no power outlets, or any audiovisual/competing equipment will be provided for the poster presentations.

    After the Conference

    Accepted Short Papers will be published in the Mensch und Computer Conference Proceedings available in the ACM Digital Library, where they will remain accessible to thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide. Rejected Short Papers that are presented at MuC’25 as Work-In-Progress will be published in the GI Library.