Special Issue Editor Guidelines
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST) is a high-quality and selective venue for papers on intelligent systems, applicable algorithms and technology with a multi-disciplinary perspective. An intelligent system is one that uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to offer important services (e.g., as a component of a larger system) to allow integrated systems to perceive, reason, learn, and act intelligently in the real world.
We receive many special issue requests each year, and few can be adopted. In order to more easily determine whether a given proposal for a special issue can be accepted, we now require that proposals address the following questions (and ideally include the listed sections). Note that acceptance of a special issue proposal is the exclusive decision of the TIST editor-in-chief and cannot be appealed.
Introduction/Motivation for Special Issue
The topic of a special issue should be a fundamental technology that can empower many applications, or an emerging topic that many people care about recently. The scope of the topic should be neither too broad (to lose focus) nor too narrow (resulting in a small audience).
When introducing your topic, please consider the following questions:
- What is the topic of the special issue?
- Why is this topic currently important?
- Why is this topic relevant to TIST?
- How/Why do you expect this special issue to have significant impact on the field?
Guest Editor Qualifications and Contact Information
A special issue can have up to four guest editors who (ideally) should come from different countries, organizations, genders, etc. This is to ensure the diversity of the team and the geographical range the special issue can impact.
Each guest editor needs to have a strong research record in the proposed area. Evidence of research records include quality publications at prestigious venues, citations, academic awards (e.g., best paper awards), and experience in serving international journals as an editorial board member, or in organizing conferences or special issues.
When listing your proposed guest editors, please consider the following questions:
- Who are your guest editors? Please include contact information, home page link, Google Scholar link, and a summary paragraph.
- Does the editorial team value and reflect diversity and inclusion?
- What is the role of each guest editor? Each guest editor must have some responsibility and be willing to contribute non-trivial time for the special issue. How does your team expect to uphold TIST’s high standards for publication?
- How many times have the proposed editors published in TIST? What other journals of similar quality and reputation or top-tier conferences have published papers by the editors?
- What other editorial experience do the editors have?
- Have any of the editors proposed or published a TIST special issue in the past 12 months? (If so, they should wait until 12 months have passed.)
Proposed Timeline
This timeline should include submission deadline, notification date, revised paper deadline, and final acceptance date.
Preliminary List of Papers and Authors to be Solicited
Please provide a list of at least three papers (with authors and title or topic) who plan to submit to your special issue. In addition, provide a list of people who will be invited to contribute papers. Ideally, the guest editors would solicit papers from renowned professionals in the field.
The submissions of a special issue cannot only come from a workshop. The call for papers must be open to the public, and note that any articles that extend workshop or conference work must have at least 25% new material. The acceptance rate should be lower than 30%.
Note that guest editors cannot publish regular papers in their own special issue except for writing an introduction or co-authoring a survey paper for the special issue. The survey paper will be reviewed as a regular submission, managed by the Editor-in-Chief. Acceptance is not guaranteed.