Feature Request: Enhanced Affiliation Fields in HotCRP Submission Form

[MrPugh]

Feature Request: Enhanced Affiliation Fields in HotCRP Submission Form

Summary

I propose extending the HotCRP submission form to include structured affiliation fields. This change aims to improve the consistency of author affiliations, reducing the need for manual adjustments when formatting information for conference webpages.

Background & Rationale

Currently, authors provide affiliation details in a single general field, leading to highly inconsistent entries. Some authors submit minimal information (e.g., just a university acronym), while others include excessive details (e.g., department, address, zip code, city, and country). This inconsistency requires additional effort to standardize affiliations for conference webpages.

Many conferences likely encounter similar issues when preparing their "Accepted Papers" list. The root cause appears to be the unstructured way affiliations are collected in HotCRP.

Proposed Enhancements

To improve clarity and flexibility in collecting affiliation details, I suggest modifying the submission form to include the following fields:

• Mandatory Affiliation Field – Institution name (e.g., university, research institute, or company).
• Optional Department Field – School, faculty, department, or similar subunit.
• Optional Address Field – Street, zip code, city.
• Mandatory Country Field – Country of the institution.

Additionally, to accommodate multiple affiliations per author, I propose modifying the form to allow:

• The ability to add multiple affiliations independently of author name fields.
• A mechanism (e.g., checkboxes) to associate specific affiliations with each author.

Here is a mock-up of the proposal:

Benefits

• Encourages uniformity by guiding authors on expected details.
• Reduces manual effort in standardizing affiliation data.
• Allows conference organizers to easily extract a structured subset of information for different use cases.
• Improves the accuracy and completeness of affiliation details.

I appreciate your consideration of this feature request and believe it would enhance the submission process for various conferences.