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Author Information

  • Review all Author Information and Editorial Guidelines carefully before submitting
  • Review the ACM information regarding author representations (see: http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/author_representations)
  • Submit manuscripts at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tmis; select "Research Article", "Research Commentary" or "Special Issue" as appropriate. When submitting to a Special Issue, be sure to include a cover letter specifying the title of the Special Issue.
  • Please note that ACM TMIS uses a single-blind submission process.

The submissions can be of the following two types: research articles and research commentaries.

Article Types

Research Articles report the original research that has not been published elsewhere. Widely distributed refereed conference papers are considered publications, but technical papers are not. The ACM disclosure requirement concerns any paper by any author of the submission that overlaps significantly with other publications. At the time of submission and in a separate writing, the corresponding author must inform the handling editor about all papers that may have substantial overlap.

The papers in the Research Commentary (RC) category differ from research articles in that they do not have to present new research findings and novel results that advance the state-of-the-art in the field. Instead, the RC papers can describe new concepts, views, possible future research directions and agendas, present new conceptual frameworks and address important current topics in the field. The RC papers tend to be shorter (up to 3000 – 4000 words), and they go through an expedited reviews process to reach the readership of the journal faster than regular submissions.

Author Policies

In addition to the policies and procedures outlined on this page, additional ACM Publications Policies can be viewed on the ACM publications website at: http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policies-toc. These policies cover important topics including plagiarism, reviewer anonymity, privacy, copyright, conflict of interest, etc.

Editorial Guidelines

Please refer to the Editorial Guidelines for details about content requirements. ACM TMIS encourages submissions that have not been published or submitted previously. ACM TMIS will accept submissions of original research that are innovative and high-impact. For additional details, please refer to the Editorial Guidelines for the types of papers that are encouraged and discouraged, information on possible topics, and information on content requirements including the following:

  • Management information systems relevance
  • Scientific rigor and contribution
  • Societal relevance and impact
  • Innovation and novelty
  • Design science and system relevance

The following types of submissions are discouraged:

  • Purely theoretical papers
  • Argumentation essays
  • Incremental research in well-established areas
  • Research targeting specific algorithms or techniques

Paper length: Papers in the Research Article category should be 4,000 to 6,000 words. ACM TMIS discourages excessively long papers (more than 7,000 words).

Papers in the Research Commentary category are expected to be no longer than 3,000 to 4,000 words.

Preparing and Formatting Your Manuscript

New Submissions: Submissions may be prepared in either Microsoft Word (including Word 2007) or LaTeX (submit the PDF) in accordance with the ACM template style found at http://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions.

Final, Accepted Submissions: If your paper is accepted, please format the the final version of your manuscript using the ACM templates: http://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions.  

Title and Abstract

  • Use a specific, descriptive, and informative title of 6 to 12 words.
  • Avoid special symbols and formulas in titles unless essential to indicate content.
  • Authors' names should be given without titles or degrees, along with their affiliations.
  • Current mailing addresses, including email addresses, should be given in a footnote.
  • The abstract should be 150 to 200 words long and should consist of short, direct, and complete sentences.
  • The abstract should state the objectives of the work, summarize the results, and give the principal conclusions.
  • Work planned but not done should not be described in the abstract. Because abstracts are often extracted from a paper and used separately, avoid the use of the first person, mathematics, and citations.

Content Indicators

An important aspect of preparing your paper for publication by ACM Press is to provide the proper indexing and retrieval information from the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS)Please read the HOW TO CLASSIFY WORKS USING ACM'S COMPUTING CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM for instructions on how to classify your document using the 2012 ACM Computing Classification System and insert the index terms into your LaTeX or Microsoft Word source file.

Mathematical and Symbolic Expressions

Short mathematical equations and other expressions in the text should be run in: (instead of each being displayed on a separate line). Avoid exponents having more multiple levels of superscripting? $e sup {x sup 2 + y sup 2}$, use $exp( x sup 2 + y sup 2 )$. Likewise, avoid the use of built-up fractions in the text. For example, instead of 1 over { italic {n}}$, use either $1 / italic {n}$ or the negative exponent form $italic {n} sup -1$. In display matter, however, built-up fractions are preferred for clarity. Likewise, avoid small-type mathematical expressions centered above or below arrows.

If submitting hardcopy from a single-font printer, then indicate special marking for symbols (e.g., italics, boldface) and clearly identify unusual symbols.

Equations that are referred to later in the text should be numbered sequentially and referred to, for instance, as Eq. 1. Do not number equations that are not referred to in the text.

Statistics

For empirical studies, the procedure should be presented in sufficient detail to be replicated by other researchers. Statistical tests should be included to support empirical claims. When reporting statistics, the name of the statistic, the degrees of freedom, the value obtained, and the p-value should be reported, e.g., F(3,65)=4.83, p < 0.01.

Figures

  • Figures include graphs of results, schematic drawings, samples of output screen dumps, and photographs of special equipment or displays.
  • All figures must be embedded in the manuscript, and also be submitted as separate files; acceptable figure file formats are .tif, .gif, .jpg, .png, and .eps.
  • In the text, each figure should be numbered and have a caption.
  • Upon publication, figures will be reduced to 12.7cm (5 inches) in width and will be printed in B&W. The use of color in the printed version will be approved on a case-by-case basis by the Editor-in-Chief, and only when absolutely necessary for the presentation of the material.
  • Care should be taken to ensure that the legends and labels within the figure are large enough to be readable after they are reduced.

Citations and the Reference List

Reference linking and citation counts are facilitated by use of standard reference formats. Please adhere to the in-text citation style and reference format guidelines that we use for ACM publications.

Note: For BibTeX examples see: http://www.acm.org/publications/authors/bibtex-formatting

Submitting Your Manuscript

  • Electronic submission will be made through Manuscript Central, ACM's submission management system: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tmis

  • If it is your first time submitting a paper using this system, you will need to create a new account (instructions can be found at the website); otherwise, enter your login and password, and follow the instructions provided for submitting your paper.

  • Select "Original Paper" or "Special Issue" as appropriate.

  • Submission will be acknowledged, and an Associate Editor (AE) will be assigned to process the manuscript. Authors can suggest 1-2 AEs who do not have a conflict of interest. However, final AE assignment decisions will be made by the Editor-in-Chief.

  • Authors are expected to maintain current contact information in Manuscript Central.

  • Instructions about submitting revisions are included with the decision letter.

The Review Process

  • Papers will be refereed anonymously and in the manner customary with scientific journals before being accepted for publication. All manuscripts will be evaluated through reference to the requirements listed in the Editorial Guidelines.

  • Authors will be informed of the review process through email. Review comments will be available through the Manuscript Central System. If a paper has been rejected, review comments intended to help authors improve their papers for possible future submission (to ACM TMIS or elsewhere), will be available through the Manuscript Central system for a period of 60 days. If a paper has been conditionally accepted, review comments will also be available in the system and must be addressed by authors in their next submission.

  • Revised versions of manuscripts, if requested, are submitted through the Manuscript Central System. The decision letter regarding your original submission is displayed and there will be a link to view a read-only copy of the scoresheet.

  • The ACM TMIS Editorial Board is committed to providing a professional and timely editorial process, as supported by the Manuscript Central review system. We strive to provide the initial editorial decision for a submission within 4 months, from the day a paper is submitted electronically to the day the initial decision is sent to the author. ACM TMIS AEs will also regard a submission to have been withdrawn if its required revision is not submitted within 3 months of the revision (first round or second round) notification. The second-round review will be returned within 2 months by the AEs. A submission will only go through at most two rounds of review. In principle, a successful ACM TMIS submission can reach a final, fully-accepted decision in 12 months or less, from the day of the initial submission.

  • Appeals: If an author has concerns about how their paper was handled, that author should first bring those concerns to the Associate Editor who handled the processing of the paper. In almost all cases, any misunderstanding will be able to be resolved then. If the concern is not addressed, the author can ask the Associate Editor to turn over processing of the paper to the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief will reexamine the materials, and make the final editorial decision. If the concerns are still not adequately addressed, then the author can appeal to the Chair of the ACM Publications Board, in accordance with ACM Policy.

Accepted Papers

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to quote long passages (60 words or more) from any material that appeared in a non-ACM publication. This policy is strictly enforced.

Proofs

  • The contact author will receive page proofs; these should be checked and returned promptly as the author is solely responsible for marking errors. Substantive changes must be approved by the Editor.

Supplemental Online-only Material

  • Please provide a brief description of your supplementary online-only material (i.e., text and multimedia material) to be published in the Digital Library. A short “readme.txt” file will appear in the DL along with your supplementary material describing its content and whatever requirements there are for using it.

ORCID Requirements

ACM requires that all accepted journal authors register and provide ACM with valid ORCIDs prior to paper publication. Corresponding authors are responsible for collecting these ORCIDs from co-authors and for providing them to ACM as part of the ACM eRights selection process. For journals using the ScholarOne submission system, the submitting author will be required to provide their own ORCID upon submission. Authors are strongly encouraged, but not required, to include ORCIDs for all authors in their source files.  Please note: ACM only requires you to complete the initial ORCID registration process. However, ACM encourages you to take the additional step to claim ownership of all your published works via the ORCID site.

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission and supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities - ensuring that your work receives proper recognition. This requirement will also enable ACM to provide improvements to the normalization process of ACM Digital Library author profile data, aid in the detection of undeclared conflicts of interest and other publications-related misconduct in ACM Publications, assist with the implementation of ACM Open, and offer a host of other researcher benefits to ACM authors and the scientific community.

Before submission, the corresponding author should register for an ORCID.  Your co-authors should also create their individual ORCIDs at that time and add them to their accounts in the manuscript submission system. Otherwise, you will need to enter them manually into the ACM rights system upon paper acceptance and before publication in the ACM Digital Library. Simple instructions for complying with this mandate are provided inside the ACM eRights system.

ORCID information for all authors will appear on the article’s page in the ACM Digital Library. If ORCIDs are included in an article’s source files, they will also be linked in the published output.

The ACM ORCID FAQ should answer many of your questions.

ACM Policies

ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects

As a published ACM author, you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.

ACM Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy

The ACM Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy describes what a COI is, who is responsible for being aware of such conflicts, how to manage COIs, and how to report violations.

ACM Peer Review Policy

ACM recognizes that the quality of a refereed publication rests primarily on the impartial judgment of their volunteer reviewers. Expectations of reviewers and ACM can be found in the Reviewer section of the Policy on Roles and Responsibilities in ACM Publishing page.

Templates

Manuscripts accepted for publication in any ACM publication must be formatted using the ACM authoring template. Submissions must also use the ACM authoring templates. ACM style files will closely approximate the final output, enabling authors to judge the page-length of their published articles.

ACM authoring templates and detailed instructions on formatting can be found at http://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. For both Word and Latex technical support, contact [email protected].

ACM Computing Classification System (CCS)

If your paper has been accepted, please read the HOW TO CLASSIFY WORKS USING ACM'S COMPUTING CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM for instructions on how to classify your document using the CCS and insert the index terms into your LaTeX or Microsoft Word source file. Providing the proper indexing and retrieval information from the CCS provides the reader with quick content reference, facilitating the search for related literature, as well as searches for your work in ACM's Digital Library and on other online resources.

Author Rights

ACM authors can manage their publication rights in either of the following ways:

  • A license granting ACM non-exclusive permission to publish—allowing authors to self-manage all rights to their work by choosing to pay for perpetual open access from the ACM Digital Library.
  • A publishing license agreement granting ACM exclusive publication rights—by granting ACM the right to serve as the exclusive publisher of a work and to manage ongoing rights and permissions associated with the work, including the right to defend it against improper use by third parties. (This license is roughly the equivalent of ACM’s traditional Copyright Transfer Agreement except that the author continues to hold copyright.)

As of January 2023, per decision of the ACM Publications Board, the traditional Copyright Transfer Agreement option is no longer available for ACM authors.  ACM will continue to defend all ACM-published works against improper use when allegations of publication-related misconduct are brought to light.  For more information please refer to this article in The Blue Diamond.

Additionally, ACM authors may post all versions of their work, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", to non-commercial repositories such as ArXiv. See the ACM Author Rights page for additional information.

Learn more, including about posting to pre-print servers and institutional repositories, by visiting the ACM Author Rights page.

Open Access

ACM has made a commitment to become a fully sustainable and Plan S compliant Open Access (OA) scholarly publisher within approximately five years. ACM offers a number of ways to achieve this goal, including Hybrid OAGold OA, and the ACM OPEN program.

Most ACM journals, with the following exceptions, are Hybrid OA.  ACM Gold OA journals are:

Click here to view the Article Processing Charges (APCs) to publish your article Open Access.

Additionally, all corresponding authors from an institution participating in ACM OPEN will have their research articles published OA at the time of publication at no cost to the authors.  Click here for a list of participating institutions. To ensure eligibility for the program, corresponding authors from participating institutions must use their institutional email address upon submission.

Language Services

ACM has partnered with International Science Editing (ISE) to provide language editing services to ACM authors. ISE offers a comprehensive range of services for authors including standard and premium English language editing, as well as illustration and translation services, and also has significant outreach in China. Editing is available for both Word and LaTeX files. As an ACM author, you will receive a generous discount on ISE editing services. To take advantage of this partnership, visit the Dedicated ACM Editing Service. (Editing services are at author expense and do not guarantee publication of a manuscript.)

Author-izer Service

Once your manuscript is published, this service allows you to generate and post a link on your home page or institutional repository to your published article. This link will let any visitors to your personal bibliography pages download the definitive version of the articles for free from the ACM DL. These downloads will be recorded as part of your DL usage statistics. A detailed description of the service and instructions for its use may be found at the ACM Author-Izer Service page.

LaTeX Collaborative Authoring Tool on Overleaf Platform

ACM has partnered with https://www.overleaf.com/, a free cloud-based, authoring tool, to provide an ACM LaTeX authoring template. Authors can easily invite colleagues to collaborate on their document. Among other features, the platform automatically compiles the document while an author writes, so the author can see what the finished file will look like in real time. Further information can be found at https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. The ACM LaTeX template on Overleaf platform is available to all ACM authors https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/acm-official#.WOuOk2e1taQ.

Kudos Article Sharing Platform

Kudos is a free service that you can use to promote your work more effectively. After your paper has been accepted and uploaded to the ACM Digital Library, you'll receive an invitation from Kudos to create an account and add a plain-language description. The Kudos “Shareable PDF” allows you to generate a PDF to upload to websites, such as your homepage, institutional repository, preprint services, and social media. This PDF contains a link to the full-text version of your article in the ACM DL, adding to download and citation counts.

Author Gateway

Please be sure to visit the ACM Author Portal for additional important author information.

Contact Us

For further assistance and questions regarding the journal editorial review process and paper assignment to an issue, contact the journal administrator ([email protected]).