Availability of Published Articles

If your article is accepted for publication, it will be made available in the ACM Digital Library and subsequently in a printed journal issue.

A large proportion of potential readers have access to the ACM Digital Library via institutional or personal subscriptions. To ensure convenient access even for other readers, you can use ACM’s free Author-izer service to post an unrestricted link to the official ACM version of your published article from either your personal home page or an institutional repository.

• ACM page with details of the Author-izer service (opens in new browser tab or window)

 

Appropriate Types of Submission

Content of Articles

TiiS welcomes submissions of original, unpublished work that is not under consideration elsewhere.

A more precise and complete explanation of these conditions can be found on the page that describes ACM’s policy concerning author representations (i.e., statements implicitly made by an author who submits a manuscript).

The topic of the manuscript should be consistent with the aims and scope of TiiS as described on this website (see in particular the pages on Research Areas and Perspectives). As long as this condition is met, it is no problem if the exact subject area of the manuscript is not mentioned anywhere on this website.

Literature reviews or survey articles will be considered if they present a new perspective or otherwise clearly benefit the field. Such an article can go beyond a summary of literature by, for example, defining its topic in a new way or identifying common themes and results concerning superficially different systems or studies.

Extended Versions of Conference Papers

A manuscript that includes material that has been previously published, as in widely disseminated conference proceedings, should contain significant amplification or extension of the original material. The TiiS submission might include a deeper exploration of the algorithms, perhaps including new theorems, proofs, or implementation details; and/or a deeper exploration of the interaction issues, perhaps including the consideration of new design alternatives or a more in-depth study with users. The submission should offer strong new impact, not a repackaging of the same material. Authors should include a cover letter that gives a link to the previously published paper, identifies the new contributions, and explains how their importance justifies publication in TiiS.

(More detailed information about ACM’s general policies concerning simultaneous and prior submission will be found in a separate ACM page.)

Possible Lengths

Most published articles are between 20 and 35 pages long in the ACM style.

Since the overall goal is to publish high-quality, high-impact articles, even submissions with unusual lengths will be considered if their content is consistent with this goal. In particular, the length of a manuscript intended as the definitive publication on a major project or line of research may exceed the typical range of length just mentioned. On the other side, if a manuscript presents a significant advance that can be described concisely, there is no point in adding unnecessary material just to reach a typical length.  

Deciding Whether to Submit

Getting Preliminary Feedback

If, before deciding whether to submit to TiiS, you would like to get some informal feedback, feel free to write to the editors-in-chief with any questions. All queries are answered promptly.

If you are considering a submission to a particular special issue, you may (also) wish to contact the guest editor whose email address is listed in the special issue call.

Anticipating the Reviewing Procedure

The page about the Reviewing Procedure will give you an idea of the steps that will be involved in the processing of your submission.

The Submission Planner shows interactively how the processing of your manuscript (including any necessary revisions) will look for particular possible submission dates.  

Preparing a Submission

Formats

Please use the ACM Transactions format for your submission. The use of a significantly different format would make it harder in several respects for editors and reviewers to deal with the submission. Although minor devations are not important at this point, any submission that does not use the standard format will be returned to the authors by the assistant to the editors-in-chief with a request to resubmit it in the standard format.

Templates for LaTeX and Word are supplied and supported by ACM; the format listed for TiiS on these pages is the “Small Standard Format”:

• LaTeX: http://www.acm.org/publications/submissions/latex_style

  Note: If you proceed by entering your own text into the sample file called “acmsmall-sample.tex”, please replace “acmtecs” with “acmtiis” in the “\documentclass ...” line, since otherwise an incorrect journal name will appear at various places in your manuscript.

• Word: http://www.acm.org/publications/word_style/word-style-toc/

  Notes:

  • Please ignore the file “ACM.dot” in this archive, since it does not generate the correct styles. This problem is now being fixed; in the meantime, please create your submission by starting with the sample Word document and replacing its content with your own content.
  • Using style files in Word often leads to unpredictable results, so don’t worry if your manuscript doesn’t look like the sample manuscript in every detail. Small discrepancies can be handled by the professional typesetters in the final phase of the production process.

These ACM web pages also include information about how to format references to literature.

Parts of a Submission

In addition to the main text, the manuscript should include the following elements, which ensure proper indexing, classification, retrieval, and dissemination:

• Descriptive title
• Authors’ names and affiliations

  Authors’ names should be listed without titles or degrees. The affiliation should show the name of the organization at which the work was conducted. If an author’s current address is different, it should be given in a footnote on the first page. The contact author should be identified with a footnote on the first page.

• Abstract

  The abstract should normally be 150–250 words long. It should summarize the objectives of the work, the methods applied, the results, and the conclusions. It should not include citations or mention plans for future work.

• (Optional:) Electronic appendix

  Some types of material are normally included in one or more “electronic appendices”, which will be linked from the ACM Digital Library but not included in the main PDF file in the Digital Library or in the printed journal issue. Such material is likely to be of interest to only a subset of the readers of the article. These types of material include:

  • Extensive examples of materials used in an experiment
  • An explanation of a research method that some readers are likely to be unfamiliar with
  • Presentations of results (in tables, graphics, or text) on a level of detail that is appropriate for readers who are especially interested in the topic.

Leaving such material out of the main manuscript enables authors to make the article more manageable and appealing to most readers.

If your manuscript includes such material, please mark it within the main document as one or more electronic appendices, following the examples given in the ACM style files. The appendices will be immediately available to reviewers as part of the main document; they will be detached from the main document in the final typesetting stage.

With regard to nonprintable material such as video files, see the remarks below on Supplementary Electronic Material.

Making Use of Language Services (Optional)

ACM has partnered with American Journal Experts (AJE) to provide language editing (and translation) services to ACM authors. AJE has helped thousands of researchers around the world to present their research in polished English suitable for publication in journals such as those published by ACM. Editing is available for both Word and LaTeX files.

To take advantage of this partnership, authors can visit http://www.aje.com and use the referral code “ACM15” to obtain a 15% discount off all AJE services. (Editing services are at the authors’ expense, and they do not guarantee the publication of a submission.)

Please note that formatting assistance is provided at no charge to authors by Aptara, as is specified on the author style guide pages mentioned above.

Explaining Relevance

If a submission focuses almost exclusively either on intelligent technology or on users’ interaction with such technology (cf. the page on the different possible perspectives), it should also include a brief discussion of the “other” side of the picture: For example, authors who focus on an technological advance can discuss (a) the types of interactive system that can make use of this advance and (b) the likely impact of the advance on the interaction of users with such systems. Similarly, authors who focus on an advance in the understanding or design of interaction can discuss the types of intelligent technology that can be involved in this type of interaction and the implications of their work for the design of such technology. Brief discussions of this sort do not need to present new research results, since their function is to explain the relevance of the article’s main contributions to the general issues addressed by TiiS.

Ensuring the Legibility of Graphics

Reviewers and editors often read manuscripts on a monochrome printout – as do many readers who download articles from the ACM Digital Library. So please print your submission on a monochrome printer and check to make sure that every graphic is clearly legible. Note that even a graphic that looks beautiful and clear on the computer screen may be incomprehensible when printed on paper, in which case it could seriously impede the reviewing process. Each submitted manuscript will be checked by an administrator before it enters the reviewing process, and manuscripts with one or more illegible graphics will be returned to the authors for improvement.

Supplementary Electronic Material

If an article is supplemented with nonprintable electronic material, the ACM Digital Library will offer a link to that material alongside its link to the main article, as is done with printable electronic appendices (described above). For example, authors may provide a video, an animation, or a demonstration system.

If you wish to use this option, please upload each such file as a “supplementary file” when submitting the manuscript (as described in the instructions on the submission site). Indicate in your cover letter that this material is intended for inclusion in the Digital Library, and provide a reference to it in the main article (e.g., “see the video which is available along with this article in the ACM Digital Library”).

Third-Party Material

If your manuscript includes nontextual material that is owned by someone else, please note that, before publication, it will be necessary to provide documentation that the owner has given permission for its use.

ACM has a web page with the details of ACM’s policy regarding third-party material.

Avoiding Inadvertent Violations of ACM's Plagiarism Policy

All manuscripts submitted to TiiS are automatically processed by the “CrossCheck” plagiarism checker, which produces a detailed analysis of any textual overlap with previous publications. Experience has shown that even authors who presumably have no intention to plagiarize sometimes reproduce text in ways which are inconsistent with ACM’s policies on plagiarism. In the case of such errors, the manuscript must be returned to the authors so that the problems can be fixed. Authors are therefore advised to avoid the following mistakes in the first place:

1. Reproduction of text from your own previously published work without citation

   You are allowed to reproduce text from your own previously published work, provided that the previous work is cited in the present submission. But copying from your own previous work without such citation is not permissible.

2. Reproduction of text from other authors with citation but without quotation marks

   Even when you clearly cite previous authors whose text is copied, you must make sure to put quotation marks around any passage copied. Admittedly, it may seem reasonable to copy text in cases like this on the grounds that the original authors know better than anyone else how to describe their results or their technology concisely and accurately. But please do include the quotation marks, unless you prefer to paraphrase in your own words what the previous authors said.

3. Reproduction of text from other authors without citation or quotation marks

   This practice is obviously unacceptable, and it will normally result in the rejection of a submission.

 

Submitting the Completed Manuscript

When your manuscript is ready to be submitted:

• Access the manuscript management system ScholarOne Manuscripts by following the instructions given on a separate page.
• All further information and instructions will be found in the TiiS Guide, to which context-specific links are provided in the ScholarOne Manuscripts pages.

The reviewing procedure is described on a separate page.