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Publication checklist

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Gabor Szarnyas edited this page Apr 7, 2025 · 62 revisions

This page presents some reminders on what to check before you submit your publication.

Most of these are the result of basic errors or the lack of typographical knowledge. As such, they can be checked with a simple search or just skimming through the document.

Advice from others: Checklist for Revising a SIGKDD Data Mining Paper by Eamonn Keogh

General

  • Scroll through the document and thoroughly check for todos. Do a quick search for the todo string.
  • Make sure that figure and table caption punctuations are consistent. A possible punctuation is that they all have a dot at the end of the caption.
  • Check number formattings. In English texts, the decimal separator should be a . character. You may add a small non-breaking space between every three digit by using the numprint package, e.g. \numprint{123456}.
  • Make sure that you use headline capitalization consistently throughout the document. To check this, seach for section{ which will give you all \section{...}, \subsection{...} and \subsubsection{...} lines. If you use paragraphs, also search for \paragraph{.
  • Check your quotation marks. Use the International variations table and the Quotation mark glyphs table.

LaTeX

  • Broken references: search for [?], [?,, ,?, and ,?] in the PDF document.

  • Broken citations: search for ?? in the PDF document. Citations should be punctuated like this one [1].

  • Most templates do not use the \frenchspacing option, which makes the space character wider after each dot character. Typically, you should search for occurences of e.g. and i.e. to change them to e.g.\ and i.e.\ , respectively. You can define commands to never forget about this:

    \usepackage{xspace}
\newcommand{\ie}{\emph{i.e.}\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\eg}{\emph{e.g.}\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\etal}{\emph{et al.}\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\etc}{etc.\xspace}

    Using italics (\emph) is optional. In US spelling, you should also add commas after 'i.e.' and 'e.g.'.

  • Check your Bibliography. If something should be capitalized, add braces to the title, e.g. {MONDO} {P}roject and {I}nc{Q}uery-{D}. However, do not add double braces ({{...}}) around the whole title. For details, see How to not mess up your bibliographies with Bibtex.

  • Check whether the bibliography has \_ instead of a simple underscore _. Some templates do not omit the backslash automatically, leading to broken links.

Word

  • Broken references and citations: search for the string Error!. This will give you the error messages, including Error! Reference Source Not Found. and Error! Bookmark Not Defined..

Formatting

Typical errors

Use the Silver Searcher (Windows port) to search for typical errors, such as repeated words (e.g., "the the"):

ag -s " a [aeioAEIOU]"
ag -i " an [bcdfghjklmnpqrstvxzwy]"
ag -i "\s\b(\w+) +\1\b"
ag -i "\s\b(\w+ +\w+) +\1\b"

Find instances of inconsistent spelling -- for example, if you want to use British spelling and want to eliminate optimize, optimization, etc., run:

ag '\w+(ization|ize)' --tex -o --no-filename *.tex | sort -u

If you use US spelling, search for:

ag '\w+(isation|ise)' --tex -o --no-filename *.tex | sort -u

Submission systems

IEEE – Missing fonts

If some fonts, e.g. Helvetica, are missing, try converting the document to PDF/A which replaces fonts.

If your figures are missing some fonts (e.g. if they were generated with R and do not have Helvetica and ZapfDingbats embedded), you can also use the following command to embed them with GhostScript. This will embed fonts into all the figures in the fig/ folder, adjust appropriately if needed:

for i in fig/**/*.pdf; do gs -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dCompressFonts=true -dSubsetFonts=true -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=$i.embed -c ".setpdfwrite <</NeverEmbed [ ]>> setdistillerparams" -f $i; mv $i.embed $i; done

⚠️ Keep in mind that the flag -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen rasterizes images to 72dpi.

IEEE – ZapfDingbats font

Use the useDingbats=FALSE option for ggsave, for example:

ggsave(file="results.pdf", width=170, height=160, units="mm", useDingbats=FALSE)

Springer – Captions in Arial font are missing

During the submission of a paper to SOSYM (Software & Systems Modeling), we experienced that some figures (created in Microsoft PowerPoint and Visio) in the "PDF proof" version (intended for proofreading) were missing all captions. This was strange since the captions used Arial font as recommended by SOSYM. Changing the LaTeX build from PDFLaTeX to XeLaTeX solved the problem.

Is the submitted camera-ready PDF still updatable?

Experiences as of 2020:

  • ACM: no
  • easyChair: yes
  • CMT: yes

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