IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages Seattle, Washington September 10-14, 2000

VL 2000: Hints for Submitting a Successful Research Paper

Here are a few hints about how to help improve the chances your research paper submission will be accepted.

1. Look at examples that the VL reviewers thought were good in prior years. Here are some recent winners of the "Best Paper Award". You can see many other papers that have been accepted in recent years via link items 3.2 and 3.3 below.
• 1999 Best Paper Award: K. Hewagamage, M. Hirakawa, and T. Ichikawa, Interactive Visualization of Spatiotemporal Patterns Using Spirals on a Geographical Map
. (This link is to IEEE's online abstract and full paper. If you do not subscribe to their online library service but would like a copy of the full paper, you may contact the first author to request a copy.)
• 1998 Best Paper Award: T. Igarashi, J. Mackinlay, B. Chang, and P. Zellweger, Fluid Visualization of Spreadsheet Structures
2. Look at the sample review forms. These are the questions the reviewers will use to decide about your paper's acceptance. Consider each of these questions carefully and ask yourself how well your paper will do on them.

3. One problem that often causes a paper to be rejected is a lack of ability to say what the new contribution of your paper is. The way to determine this (and to convince the reviewers) is to be familiar with how it relates to the work of other VL researchers, and to compare your work with theirs. A large portion of the work that will help you address this issue can, in many cases, be found by looking through:
1. recent copies of the Journal of Visual Languages of Computing,
and
2. recent years' proceedings from this conference (online under "VL" at IEEE's site), and
3. the Visual Languages Bibliography
, and
4. Bertrand Ibrahim's Visual Programming Page and Bibliography
.
5. Submissions must not have been published previously and must not be currently under consideration by another conference or journal. If you have a previously published paper or one that is under review that you would like to distinguish from your VL submission, don't hesitate to clarify the distinction in the body of your paper.

   

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