1 From submission to publication
This chapter introduces the entire process from submission to final acceptance or rejection of a manuscript at typical conferences and journals. The process from submission to final acceptance or rejection of a journal is not very different in various disciplines. The conference is mainly aimed at conferences in computer science and related fields (such as electronics, information, and other engineering categories). Finally, we summarize some experiences on how to improve the hit rate of papers.
1.1 Meeting
The function and recognition of conferences vary greatly in different fields of technology. However, in computer and related fields, conference papers are becoming more and more important and are even more difficult to be accepted than first-class journals in the same field. Therefore, this article mainly introduces the conference requirements, review, admission, publication and other processes in computer-related fields.
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is currently the largest engineering association in the world, and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the largest computer association in the world. These two associations sponsor and cooperate with many international conferences. Sponsored conferences will have IEEE or ACM in the name of the conference; cooperating conferences cannot have IEEE or ACM in the conference name. The acceptance rate of the paper will be much higher, and its recognition will be much lower. Conference admissions of both types are published by IEEE or ACM Press (there are many branches in IEEE, and each branch has its own publishing house, such as CS Press, which is published by the Computer Society branch).
Many conferences now come with several Workshops and Tutorials . Since the papers in the Workshop are usually not as good as those in the main conference in terms of review and quality control, and some even accept manuscripts that are rejected by the main conference, and the Tutorial is usually just a short course on a certain topic given by experts in the field, and no paper is published, so I won’t discuss it here. Consider Workshops and Tutorials. Many conferences also have different types of manuscript channels, such as Doctoral Consortium (DC, Doctoral Forum) and New Idea and Emerging Results (NIER, New Ideas and Results). In addition to some special requirements, the review and admission process is the same as that of the main conference. The regular full papers (full papers or regular papers, just different conferences have different names) are almost the same, so it is recommended to refer to the following introduction to the full text of the main conference.
1.2 Conference submission, review, acceptance, and publication process
1.2.1 Post
First, you need to know the scope of the meeting . Then you need to know the word count or page count requirements for that conference . It is recommended that the writing length must reach the maximum number of pages restricted by the conference, otherwise reviewers will think that the content of the paper is too thin.
Some conferences have double-blind review , that is, the authors do not know who the reviewers are, and the reviewers do not know who the authors are. This requires the paper to be anonymous, that is to say, the author's name and affiliation cannot be included, and one's past work cannot be explicitly cited or pointed out in the paper. You cannot list papers you have published in the literature list.
1.2.2 Review
Conference papers are reviewed by the conference’s Program Committee members (PC members). The whole process includes the following steps:
(1) After the deadline, Program Chair(s) invites PC members to mark (bidding) papers they are willing to review in the online submission system.
(2) PC chair(s) assign (assign) 2 to 5 PC members to each paper as reviewers in the system based on the PC members' annotations, and then notify them to start the review.
(3) PC members generally have 3 to 8 weeks to review the manuscript. Many will ask their own doctoral students or even master's students to review.
(4) Some high-quality conferences will give the author an opportunity to rebuttal the reviewers' comments, which takes about 7 to 10 days. As long as the average overall rating is not too low, authors would be wise to take advantage of this opportunity. Especially for opposite comments from different reviewers on the same issue, and comments that the author thinks are completely wrong or misunderstood. Some meetings do not have this step and go directly to the next step, which is decision.
(5) 4 to 10 weeks after the deadline, the author will receive an email notification from the PC Chair(s), informing him of the decision based on the review results, whether to accept or reject the manuscript. and the review comments of several anonymous reviewers.
1.2.3 Revision and final draft publication
After the paper is accepted, the author can also revise and improve it, prepare the final draft (camera-ready version) according to the specific format required, remove the page number (Program Chair(s) will insert the page number of the paper in the conference proceedings), Insert the specific information of the conference, the publication number of the proceedings, standard copyright instructions, etc. Finally, submit the final document in the system, along with the required copyright statement. It is best if the charts used in the paper are made by yourself, or are screenshots generated by your own system. If you use figures from other people's papers or books, you need written permission. The easiest way is to send an email to the author of the original figure, inform the purpose of use, and request permission to use it. As long as the original author replies to the email and agrees, you can Use it. If you disagree or do not receive a reply, delete the picture. If it is a schematic diagram, the author can also make one himself.
1.3 Journals
At present, most journals still follow the traditional copyright policy, namely Copyright Transfer. The author signs the copyright transfer agreement and transfers the copyright to the publisher without paying any fees. The publisher charges subscription fees from university libraries and download fees from readers from the journal website.
In recent years, as the Web continues to mature, publishing electronic articles directly online not only saves costs, but also allows you to reach readers as quickly as possible. Major publishing houses subsequently launched a new business model, namely Open Access. The author pays a page fee, allowing the publisher to publish online on the journal's website, and anyone can download it for free. For readers, this is a good policy.
Therefore, journals are generally divided into three categories according to their copyright policies: copyright transfer type, open access type and hybrid type. The last one is to use the above two policies together. After the paper is accepted, the author can choose one of the copyright modes. Most of these journals only require the author to choose after the article is finally accepted.
Conference papers published in journals
Some conferences have cooperation agreements with specific journals, and each year these conferences will have a special issue corresponding to a cooperative journal. There are two main ways of cooperation:
The first way is that the special issue can directly publish the modified final versions of all full papers (or regular papers, hereafter referred to as full texts) accepted at the conference, and the conference itself does not publish formal proceedings. For example, the current IEEE Visualization and ACM SIGGRAPH conferences in the field of computer science correspond to IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVGG) and ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) respectively. That is, every regular paper accepted by IEEE Visualization directly becomes TVGG journal articles, every technical paper accepted by ACM SIGGRAPH directly becomes a TOG journal article.
The second method is that the full text of the accepted conference papers is included in the officially published conference proceedings, so it is considered to be published publicly. Conference organizers (usually Program Chairs, as guest-editors of special issues) select the best few papers from all accepted full papers to recommend to the corresponding special issue. The author must add a lot of content to expand his paper, otherwise it will be considered a duplicate publication. The journal will then arrange the review, and some journals and conferences will arrange the review together. The subsequent review to publication process is the same as that of a normal journal, but the review cycle is often much faster.
1.4 Journal submission, review, revision, acceptance and publication process
1.4.1 Post
Before submitting, you need to find a journal that is suitable for your article. For journals that you are unfamiliar with or have not submitted manuscripts to, you should carefully read their author instructions (or author guidelines). The scope of the journal, word or page limits, etc.
Most journals submit articles online. You need to fill in the title, author, abstract, keywords, whether you are submitting for a current special issue or special issue, and upload a cover letter and documents. Some upload multimedia files, highlight documents of the paper, and signed copyright agreement documents. Some journals also require that each author's contribution to the article be stated in a fixed location in the article and that there is no conflict of interest.
Some journals allow authors to recommend reviewers. It is highly recommended to take advantage of such opportunities and recommend reviewers who are familiar with your work, have communicated at conferences, or have discussed related work. However, it should be noted that the recommended reviewers cannot have conflicts of interest with any authors of the article, such as those from the same institution, co-authors within the past 5 years, etc.
1.4.2 Review
When a manuscript is received on the journal website, the editor-in-chief will designate an associate editor or himself/herself as the handling editor (hereinafter referred to as the editor) for the article .
Journal review cycles vary widely. Authors will receive a first round of notifications informing the corresponding author of the editor's decision based on the review results, together with the review opinions of several anonymous reviewers.
Editorial decisions may be:
(1) accept, that is, hire. Usually it is impossible to get accepted in the first round without revision.
(2) minor revision, that is, small revision. This is basically the best result, and the chances of being hired in the next round are very high.
(3) major revision, that is, major revision. In many cases, this will be the result. As long as you make careful revisions, you will still have a good chance of being hired in the next round.
(4) Reject, that is, reject or reject the manuscript. Some journals will clearly state that the paper cannot be resubmitted to this journal. If this is not explicitly stated, the author can revise it before submitting it.
Regardless of whether the review decision requires major or minor revisions, or the first round notice of some journals does not clearly indicate major or minor revisions, but only states that revisions are required and then re-reviewed, the editor will clearly require the author to provide the review opinions in the next round . List of modifications, item by item . Some journals also explicitly require that the modified areas be marked in papers submitted after a round of revisions.
1.4.3 Modification
After receiving a notice of minor revision, major revision or even rejection, the paper needs to be revised (even if the manuscript is rejected, it is recommended to revise whether to resubmit to the journal or resubmit elsewhere). If modification is the key to whether the paper is finally accepted, the extreme importance of making a modification document (or modification list) is emphasized here. The editor may specify in the notice that when submitting a revised manuscript, the revised document needs to be submitted at the same time, or written in a cover letter.
The specific method of modifying and writing this document can be as follows:
(1) Copy the review comments of all reviewers (sometimes the editor will also summarize some comments and include them) into a blank document;
(2) First of all, you would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their constructive comments. Your paper has been revised strictly in accordance with all the comments;
(3) For each comment or opinion, carefully revise the corresponding part of the paper, and then briefly explain under this opinion how the paper was revised and in which part. It's best to use a different color or font, and clearly label it with "Response:" or similar. Don't miss any comments, even if it's a correction to a spelling mistake, mark it as changed.
(4) Even if you disagree with the reviewer's opinion, do not argue here. At most, explain it tactfully (for example, why it is difficult to modify);
(5) It is also best to mark the revised parts in the paper with different colors or highlights.
The editor handling the paper will first check the entries in the modification document and the corresponding paper parts to see if they have all been carefully revised. If not, the paper will most likely be rejected directly. If the revision is comprehensive and the previous decision was a minor revision, it is likely to be accepted directly. If it was a major revision before, the editor will most likely ask the same reviewers to review it again. However, if the reviewers' opinions are inconsistent or contradictory, the editor is likely to invite one more reviewer. This will enter the second round of review, which is the second review. Depending on how thorough the author's revisions are, the process may be repeated, entering a third, fourth or even fifth round, or the manuscript may be rejected. For papers that have not been revised thoroughly, the editor sometimes decides to reject the paper after the second or third review. Therefore, the author should make comprehensive and thorough revisions in the first round, and then the chance of being accepted will be very high.
In the notice from the editor to the author, a deadline for submitting a revised version will be given, usually one to three months from the notification date to the deadline. Some journals do not specify how much time is required for revisions. Here we recommend a general time scale that an author needs to grasp; a major revision should take about a month, and a minor revision should not exceed two weeks. Exceeding the given modification time is likely to be rejected, so once you receive the modification notification, you must treat the modification task as the most urgent matter .
1.4.4 Rejection or acceptance and proofreading
The article may be rejected or accepted after the first trial, or even the second and third trials. If your manuscript is rejected, don’t be discouraged. Revise it carefully based on the review comments and submit it elsewhere.
If you are accepted, you still need to make modifications based on the last review comments (which should only be minor changes) before submitting the final version. Journals usually also require submission of a copyright statement. As mentioned above, if the journal is hybrid, you need to choose copyright transfer or open access.
After formatting the accepted papers, the publishing house will send a proofreading version to the author. If there are uncertainties, questions will be given (such as marking Q1, Q2, etc.), and proofreading results will generally be returned within 24 to 48 hours. The author needs to answer these specific questions one by one without any suspense. At the same time, he should clearly mark the areas that need to be modified or corrected on the proofread PDF document according to the proofreading and marking method provided by the publisher. Note that the publishing house has clear instructions on the length of revisions to the proofreading version. Major changes are generally not allowed, with a maximum of one or two sentences and small modifications such as some terminology, punctuation marks, and numerical errors.
1.4.5 Publication cycle
Including revision, re-examination, final typesetting and other processes, a journal article may take 2 to 3 years from submission to publication. In deep learning in the computer field, results that are delayed for more than a year may be outdated, so websites like arXiv.org will appear so that authors can publish them online informally.
1.5 How to improve hit rate
By following the following eight requirements, the chance of your paper being accepted will be greatly improved:
(1) Imitate the storytelling sequence, writing style and presentation format (figures, tables, screenshots, etc.) of papers published in top conferences or top journals.
(2) For any new concepts and methods, as your own contribution, you must provide complete arguments, including definition, implementation, experimental results, etc. Make every contribution (claim) impeccable.
(3) Show the first draft to your instructor, then ask classmates or friends outside the subject to read it again, and listen carefully to their feedback. Then ask experts in the same field to read and provide suggestions, and it is best to cooperate with them.
(4) Do not make low-level errors, such as grammatical and spelling errors. If you are not satisfied with the paper you read, you must not submit it.
(5) Find a conference or journal that covers the direction of your paper, comply with the rigid requirements in the submission instructions, and do not miss the steps and required materials for online submission.
(6) Don’t miss relevant documents and their citations. Before submitting to a certain conference or journal, conduct a thorough search for relevant papers published in the conference or journal in the past and cite them. Cite relevant papers by the chairperson and members of the conference program committee, or by the editor-in-chief and editorial board members of the journal.
(7) After receiving the review opinions, revise them promptly, conscientiously and carefully, and submit revised documents and revised drafts in a timely manner.
(8) Submit the final typesetting draft (camera-ready) for the conference or the proofreading draft for the journal on time.
bibliographic data quantitative data
dissertation thesis
in a sound way in a sound way
opportunity appropriate
some typos some typos
manuscript manuscript
sound reasonable
introduction introduction
state statement
rate evaluation
icon icon
page budget page budget
periodical journal