Prospective Academic Communities and Publication Places

As a phd student who want to enter academia, it is necessary and helpful for me to identify my academic communities that I maybe part of some day.

The first community I would like to refer to is ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). Human Computer Interaction is the youngest of nine core areas of computer science as defined by the Association for Computing Machinery(ACM). This community began at 1982, and has provided a forum for the discussion of all aspectis of HCI through a series of conferences, publications, web sites, email discussion groups, and other services. My advisor Jack Carroll is the Editor-in-Chief of its journal ACM Transactions of Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). And its annual conference ACM CHI(conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) is the top conference in this area. It was my dream place for publication when I was in IBM but all my three submissions were rejected. The rankings I got from the reviewers were 1 (strongly reject) for the first paper, 2 (reject) for the second one, and 3 for the last one. This year I submitted another paper to it, according to this arithmetic progression, I guess it should be rated 4 and thus be accepted. :p


The Association for Information Systems (AIS) is another community I am interested in. Actually I got acquaited to this community just in this summer because I needed to distribute my online questionnaire via various HCI related mail lists. Its Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (AIS HCI) may be the one most closed to me. It is starting a transactions on HCI (THCI), which is most likely a high-quality place to publish. Probably I will submit a paper on social ties accustomized from my candidacy paper to it. It will be so cool if I can have a paper in the No. 1 Issue 1 of a high quality journal.


There is another notable community outside the USA, the community centered on the biannual European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW) , which was started in 1989, and committed to grounding technological development and systems design in an understanding of "the specifics of practical, situated action". The european scholars in HCI are generally more theoretical, I guess this conference may reflect some of their orientation in ethnographic study, situated action, and the like. I like such trends, I hope I can have at least one publication in it before my graduation.