Formatting Computing Surveys Articles
for Electronic Publication
A guide for authors

Jon Doyle

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science
545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
doyle@mit.edu, http://www.medg.lcs.mit.edu/doyle

Abstract: This file describes the proposed format for articles to appear in ACM Computing Surveys Web pages. The file itself may be used as a template for the format described. Please direct comments to the author, and check for future revisions of the format.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.7.2 [Computing Methodologies]: Text Processing - Document Preparation; H.5.1 [Information Systems]: Information Interfaces and Presentation - Multimedia Information Systems
General Terms: Electronic Publishing
Additional Key Words and Phrases: style sheets

1 General formatting instructions

Papers appearing in Computing Surveys may appear in several formats. For instructions for preparing articles appearing in the printed volumes, see the instructions at the Surveys web site, http://www.acm.org/surveys/Authors.html. Eventually all papers will be available in electronic form as well. This document describes the format for papers appearing in electronic form, the first of which should appear in the December, 1996 issue. The sections below describe both the HTML encoding style, and the citation scheme to be used to identify papers appearing in this fashion. This file may be used as a template for formatting papers, by replacing all the dates, URLs, and text components with ones appropriate to the document to be formatted.

The preferred form for articles is as a single web page to simplify printing of copies. If using LaTeX2HTML or comparable converters to produce HTML from other formats, please use the appropriate settings to get a single file as output (separate image files are acceptable). Computing Surveys intends to prepare LaTeX formats suitable for both paper publication and conversion into HTML form, but these formats are still under development.

If preparing articles in HTML is not feasible, the fallback formats are Adobe PostScript and PDF formats. In these cases, authors should also submit originals in accordance with the ACM submission guidelines described in http://www.acm.org/pubs/submitting_accepted_articles/auth_rd.htm, so as to permit eventual conversion to HTML or other searchable formats. Note that a number of document-preparation systems (including Microsoft Word) now permit one to save documents in HTML format directly.

Articles prepared for publication, whether electronic or printed, should be accompanied by a hypertext citation page following the general guidelines set out in the draft ACM citations guide visible at http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations.html. The Computing Surveys standard form for its own citation pages, visible at http://www.acm.org/surveys/1996/Formatting/, makes citations pages look much like electronic-format papers, but with the text of the paper replaced by links to the full paper in a variety of formats. The URL used to refer to electronic publications actually references the citation page; readers must follow the links on that page to get the article proper. The final identifier in the URL used to refer to citation pages and articles will generally take the form of the first author's last name and initials. The identifier used in this descriptive article does not follow this pattern; if it did, its URL would be http://www.acm.org/surveys/1996/DoyleJ/. The Editors of Computing Surveys will resolve conflicts among identifiers when necessary by assigning new ones.

The volume numbers given for printed articles will remain the same; the current (1996) volume is 28. For articles appearing only in electronic form, the volume number will add "A" (for "(electronic) annex"), as in the volume number (28A) given for this sample article above.

Articles may contain inline graphics, as described in the section on figures and tables below. The text of the paper should appear in black type on a white background (having hypertext links appear in different colors is acceptable). Please do not use multiple frames or active processes in papers. The general guideline is that it should be straightforward to print a copy of the paper faithfully (apart from the colors in inline graphics) on an ordinary printer. Any active elements, such as demonstrations or the like, should appear in separate documents referred to by the article.

The general structure for articles contains the following elements in the following order:

HTML document structure
Copyright and publication information
Title
Author information
Abstract
Contents (if any)
Text of the article
Acknowledgments (if any)
Appendices (if any)
Footnotes (if any)
References (if any)
Permissions statement
Version information

2 HTML document structure

The document should conform to basic HTML structuring conventions. In particular, it should have a HEAD environment at the start, and the document contents proper should be contained in a BODY environment. A global HTML environment should contain both of these environments.

The primary contents of the HEAD environment is the TITLE environment. Please give the document title in the form journal name : article title. For example,

<TITLE>ACM Computing Surveys : Electronic Article Formats</TITLE> is the title environment contained in this instruction document.

3 Copyright and publication information

As seen on this document, the first element of the article indicates the publication information, including the URL of the document and the copyright information. The standard ACM copyright permissions paragraph appears at the end of the document, with a link to this from the copyright notice at the top of the document.

4 Title

The title should be set using an HTML level 1 heading, i.e., using <H1>. It should be centered. If it is long, it should be broken into multiple lines (using <BR>) to achieve a consistently pleasing appearance. Subtitles should be included in the same heading, separated by a paragraph marker (<P>).

5 Authors

The author or authors should be listed in order below the title. Each author should be described by four or more lines containing the following information, when available:

Author Name

Affiliation/Organization
Mailing address including Country
Email address, Web address

Multiple authors should be separated by paragraph markers (<P>); if several consecutive authors share the same address, their entries may be combined, listing the author names separated by commas (e.g., John Doe, Jane Roe, and John Doe II), and combining their email and Web addresses as appropriate using braces (e.g., {doe,roe,doe2}@domain.org). Both email addresses and web URLs should be links, even if presented in condensed format. The email addresses should be mailto links, while the URLs should be linked to the URLs they express.

6 Abstract

The abstract should be indented, and set off from the surrounding text by blank lines and horizontal rules, as illustrated above. This sample file uses the <blockquote> environment to perform the indentation, and separates the abstract and keyword components with paragraph markers (<P>). Please try to keep abstracts short and in a single paragraph.

7 Contents

Articles generally should not include a table of contents. When article length or other considerations make a table of contents necessary, it should appear just after the abstract. If a contents does appear, each entry in the table should have a hypertext link to the corresponding heading in the body of the article.

8 Headings

Headings within the paper should be set as HTML headings of levels 2 through 6, i.e., using <H2> through <H6>. Set first level headings using <H2>; generally, set level n headings using <Hn+1>.

8.1 Section numbering

Each section should be numbered following the form used in these instructions, e.g., separating section number, subsection number, subsubsection number, etc. by periods.

8.2 Section anchoring

Ideally, each section heading should be defined as a hypertext anchor as well, to ease traversing references in within the document and from other documents. Short articles may skip this additional information, at present. Longer articles may wish to include a table of contents, in which case these anchors are very desirable.

9 Figures and Tables

Figures and tables should appear in the text at the place of their mention (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Computing Surveys web page graphic.

Figures and tables should be anchors if distant portions of the text refers to figure or table. These references may then contain hypertext links back to the figure. Figures and tables should have captions. Except when circumstances call for some other setting, figures and tables should be centered, together with their captions. HTML standards for tables do not exist at present, but either tables constructed manually via preformatted text (<pre>) or Netscape tables are acceptable. If using graphical images, please include size information in the links (to permit text to display while the graphics are transmitted) and alternate texts (for readers without graphics). For example, the graphic on the Surveys web page is specified with the link:

<IMG WIDTH=225 HEIGHT=96 ALT="Computing Surveys" SRC="surveys.gif"> Do not use these size specifications to resize the images from their natural sizes, as resizing does not work in some browsers and can produce very bad results. If an image must be resized, resize it prior to use in the paper, so that the size specifications in the IMG link can refer to the new natural size.

10 Footnotes

Footnotes should be marked in the text with numbers enclosed in brackets, as in [1], with each footnote mark linked to the appropriate footnote text. The footnote texts should be grouped together at the end of the article, just before the references. The footnote numbers should appear in bold font.

11 Citations

Citations should appear in the text in the form [Author Year]. These should be linked to the appropriate entry in the references, or failing that, to the start of the references.

11.1 Citing electronic publications

Citations to electronic publications should follow the guidelines in the draft ACM citations guide. An example appears in the publications information at the top of this document, see also [Doyle 1996].

12 References

The references should be given in an unnumbered section titled "References" appearing at the end of the document. Use the definition list form (<DL>) for listing references. The citation keys should appear in bold font. Each reference entry should be an anchor if citations are to indicate the entry itself rather than the list of references as a whole. The general form for reference entries follows the standard Computing Surveys style, but with some differences, namely the separation of the citation tag to simplify hypertext linking and online viewing.