In recent years, a growing number of people have been engaging in science-related discussions on online platforms. This typically informal and sometimes decontextualized discourse may result in oversimplification, misinterpretation or instrumentalization of scientific knowledge. Analyzing such discourse is challenging: it differs from general online talk, spans multiple platforms, and requires interdisciplinary methods. 

This workshop provides a venue for interdisciplinary exchange on computational and social‑scientific approaches and resources to platform‑specific and cross‑platform analysis of science-related communication. This includes methods for platform-specific and cross-platform data extraction, processing and classification as well as social scientific insights into science-related communication on the Web e.g., its characteristics, evolution, impact, and possible societal effects.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.

We welcome both technical and non-technical contributions and are open to research-oriented submissions as well as submissions of resources such as annotated datasets, questionnaires and novel data collections.

The following paper categories are welcome:

• Full papers (6 – 10 pages, including references, appendices, etc.)
• Short papers (up to 5 pages including references, appendices, etc.)
• Extended abstracts for posters and demos (up to 2 pages including references, appendices, etc.)

Submission of all papers is electronic, using the EasyChair conference management system. All papers should adopt the current ACM SIG Conference proceedings template (acmart.cls). Please submit papers as PDF files using the ACM template, either in Microsoft Word format (available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template under “Word Authors”) or with the ACM LaTeX template on the Overleaf platform which is available https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computing-machinery-acm-sig-proceedings-template/bmvfhcdnxfty. In particular, please ensure that you are using the two-column version of the appropriate template.

Papers must be anonymized to support double-blind reviewing, i.e., they must not include authors’ names and affiliations. Please also avoid links to non-anonymized repositories.

List of Topics

• (Cross-platform-) crawling approaches for science-related discourse
• Methods for the detection and filtering of science-related online discourse data
• Issues and methods related to tracking/linking of users and messages within and across different platforms (e.g., X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads)
• Practical/legal/ethical issues concerning data access
• Detection of arguments, claims, evidence, sources, or stances in science-related online discourse data
• Classification of scientific claims w.r.t. verifiability, credibility, or veracity (including distinguishing different types of misinformation such as oversimplification)
• Analysis of science-related discourse on social media platforms and in online news
• Assessment of the expertness of social media users (e.g., scientist, expert, lay person)
• Classification of sources w.r.t. credibility, political leaning, and other biases
• Usage of social media platforms (e.g., X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads) by different user groups
• Usage of memes in science-related discourse on social media
• Analysis of LLM-generated text in science-related discourse
• Usage of preprints and open access publications in science-related Web discourse

Committees

Organizing committee

• Katarina Boland (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany)
• Dimitar Dimitrov (GESIS, Germany)
• Michelle Riedlinger (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia)
• Philipp Meier (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany)
• Sebastian Schellhammer (GESIS, Germany)
• Stefan Dietze (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf & GESIS, Germany

Publication

All accepted contributions except extended abstracts will be part of the WebSci’26 workshop proceedings, which will be published in a companion volume in the ACM Digital Library.

Venue

SDW26 will be collocated with ACM Web Science Conference 2026, 26-29 May 2026, Braunschweig, Germany

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to dimitar.dimitrov@gesis.org or katarina.boland@hhu.de