NCA HCTD Program

Chicago…Here we come!

The Human Communication and Technology division of NCA received what we believe to be a record number of submissions for the 2007 NCA convention in Chicago.

A total of 112 eligible papers were reviewed. Due to the high quality of many papers, the division will appeal to receive an additional panel slot (we are allotted 20 this year, now we are hoping for a 21st). While we are still waiting to hear from the NCA central office we can only project final acceptance/rejection rates. However, we are hoping to accept 66 papers (59% acceptance rate) and have organized these into 12 panels. Ten papers were transferred to the Scholar-to-Scholar sessions. We've also scheduled seven competitively selected panels (43% of the 16 submitted). The 20th panel session is reserved for the business meeting.

Among the 12 organized panels, we will have one each for Top Papers and Top Students Papers. We are happy to report that we received a large number of student submissions this year, many of which were of high quality. In fact, the Top Student Paper award will go to a student paper that was rated higher than one of the papers on the non-student submissions Top Papers panel. While we cannot reveal the identities of any of the top paper authors yet, we would like to congratulate them already and invite all of you to the Top (Student) Papers panels which we are hoping to have scheduled around the Business Meeting (NCA makes final decisions on scheduling). The small table below gives a breakdown of the accepted/rejected/transferred submissions.

 

Student Submission

Non-Student Submission

Accepted

26

30

Rejected

28

18

Transferred to scholar-to-scholar

5

5

Note: Final numbers may vary as we are waiting to hear from NCA regarding the one extra panel slot we applied for.

Here are some of the guidelines we used for paper acceptance or rejection:

  • If all three reviewers rejected a submission, we rejected it automatically.
  • If all three reviewers accepted a submission, we accepted it automatically.
  • If at least one reviewer recommended acceptance, we looked closely over ratings, comments, as well as the paper itself to make final decisions. There were cases when we reserved the right to overturn the 2:1 reviewer recommendations, both for rejections as well as acceptances.
  • Usually, papers that were mere literature reviews without apparent theory development were rejected. Theory-only (not data driven) papers that made arguments and advanced existing theory instead of simply reviewing an existing body of literature were more likely to be accepted.
  • In data-driven papers, we placed an emphasis on reviewers’ ratings on methodology, as well as on the lessons learned from the research (aka: answering the “so what” question).
  • We did not consider the “popularity” of a paper topic as an acceptance or rejection criterion, only whether the paper was appropriate for the division and conference. In other words, we did not worry about how to put papers into panels until after we had the list of accepted papers.

Thanks to all the authors who submitted papers and panels as well as to the growing list of reviewers who read through the submissions and whose comments helped us program planners tremendously in making our decisions.

See you in Chicago!
Ulla Bunz and Nanette Hogg, Co-Chairs, Programming