The Last Step Before Submitting a Paper
Feb 1, 2023

Having edited 20+ manuscripts for various venues, I have compiled a long checklist to polish papers. Hope you will find it useful :-).

Layout

  • Is there widows or orphans？
  • Is there a paragraph before going into subsections?
  • Proper captions for all images and tables?

Reference

Do not trust Google Scholar or CrossRef. There are multiple things to take care.

  • Are the venue titles consistent?
    • Same conference, same booktitle
    • Capitalization
  • Is the meta information correct?
    • Is the entry type (e.g. @inproceedings vs @article vs @incollection) correct?
    • Is the page index correct?
      • Many venues (e.g., SIGCHI, CSCW) adopt articleno and numpages. If it starts from page 1, you should be alarmed.
    • If it is a new publications without metadata, annotate it with note: Early Access
    • For online resources, mark the access date
  • Are there repetitive entries for the same reference?
  • Always a bonus
    • Include the doi or Eprint (ACM only)
    • Remove redundant items like editor, month, etc.
    • Search the publication information instead of using the preprint version

You may use some online tools to tidy your BibTex, e.g., bibtex-tidy

I personally recommend using abbreviations for common publication venues. That saves your life to shorten your paper.

Bibtex


@String(UIST={Proceedings of the Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)})
@String(CHI  = {Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)})
@String(CHIEA={Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHIEA)})
@String(IUI = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)})
@String(CSCW  = {Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)})
@String(DIS  = {Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS)})
@String(AVI = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI)})
@String(VLHCC={Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)})
@String(CNC  = {Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C\&C)})
@String(CUI={Proceedings of the International Conference on Conversational User Interface (CUI)})
@String(FAccT={Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency})

@String(IV  = {Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Information Visualization (IV)})
@String(VAST = {Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST)})
@String(BELIV = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Beyond Time and Errors on Novel Evaluation Methods for Visualization (BELIV)})

@String(WSDM={Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)})
@String(SIGMOD={Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD)})
@String(CVPR={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)})
@String(AAAI={Proceedings of the Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)})
@String(VLDB={Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment})
@String(ICDE={Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Data (ICDE)})

@String(CGF  = {Computer Graphics Forum})
@String(TOG = {ACM Transactions on Graphics})
@String(TVCG  = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics})

Misc.