Bad conference. Low quality referee process. Targeting flashy work in so-called inter disciplinary area to get more citations. Pretty low quality venue for main stream computing science topic, such as, NLP, Data Mining (because they focus more on social science perspectives rather than novel algorithms). One should be careful about submitting papers in this conference because they started unnecessarily lengthy Revise and Resubmit process recently which is of no use other than wasting time for paper authors, because of the pretty useless reviews they provide. Their referee process is unethical too, you will notice every year they have a lot of papers from the authors who are also members of their Senior Program Committee and Steering committee. Avoid at any cost.

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I was motivated to write this review since ICWSM was recently promoted to an "A" rank, and the only comment on this page is quite bitter. Some (not very well structured) comments: - ICWSM was my first conference as a graduate student, and I have yet to find a more welcoming community. - The conference is single-track, which really creates this sense of "belonging to a community" that is hard to get with massive conferences like KDD or CHI. - The methodological quality of the papers increases substantially each year! - Review quality has drastically increased since they have adopted a rolling review process. Also, just to push back a bit on Jon's point about the referee process being "unethical" --- that's absolutely not the case; if you are in SPC/SC, you are (afaiu) blind to the reviewing of your papers. Cause and effect are backward in this reasoning: people who are invested in the community (and thus have ICWSM as one of the main targets of their labs) usually assume senior positions in the conference organization.

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This conference is welcoming to new attendees such as postgraduate students:
Referees for this conference provide high quality detailed feedback:
The conference program facilitates networking:
There is a culture of interaction and feedback following presentations:
The conference is routinely attended by top people in the area:
Overall, attending this conference is worthwhile:

This is a top conference bridging computer science and social sciences. As such, it's a very important interdisciplinary venue, but it's not suitable for typical researchers specializing only in computer science, or only in social sciences. For instance, the quality of narrative and a potential broader real-world impact, are given here more importance than in pure computer science conferences, which typically are more focused on technical contributions.

Rating:

This conference is welcoming to new attendees such as postgraduate students:
Referees for this conference provide high quality detailed feedback:
The conference program facilitates networking:
There is a culture of interaction and feedback following presentations:
The conference is routinely attended by top people in the area:
Overall, attending this conference is worthwhile: