ACM TOCHI Author Information

To Submit A Manuscript

All TOCHI submissions are managed through the Manuscript Central system. You will need to create an account with that system in order to submit. Click the above link to visit Manuscript Central, create an account, and submit your paper.

Is TOCHI the Right Place to Publish Your Work?

TOCHI welcomes a broad range of submissions of original work. If you are not familiar with the journal, read the TOCHI Charter and examine back issues (Current and Past Issues).

TOCHI is committed to being the premier archival journal in human-computer interaction. It publishes only original and significant research papers. Manuscript length of up to approximately 11000 words is recommended, although longer papers will be considered. Survey papers will be considered only if they present a new perspective or clearly benefit the field. TOCHI will also consider ideas for special issues.

Note: Authors can now be concise AND thorough in a way not possible before: The ACM Digital Library will host ancillary material for a paper on its web site. This material, an online appendix that does not appear in the print journal, is linked to and accessed nicely from the online table of contents. This allows the best of both worlds: a concise presentation that is more likely to be read by general readers and students, and details (e.g., complete questionnaires, raw data, an annotated bibliography, or short animations) that are of interest mainly to others working in the area. Authors that wish to use this option should attach such material as an appendix to their submission and indicate in their cover letter that this material is intended to be ancillary material included in the digital library.

Submissions should cite relevant HCI work and show the relationship of the new work to prior research. Potentially relevant are papers in over 1000 CHI and related conference papers, TOCHI, HCI, and related journals, and the Handbooks of Human-Computer Interaction. Papers that do not cite any of this work either have overlooked relevant work, belong in a different journal (perhaps one of those cited), or should carefully position their work for this audience, explaining its relevance.

If you are still uncertain, consult the Editor or Information Director.

Use of Statistics

When reporting statistics, sufficient information, such as degrees of freedom, should be presented such that the reader can corroborate the analysis. For more recommendations and examples, see the "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association" (APA Manual).

Prior Publication Policy

ACM journal articles are normally original papers which have not been published elsewhere. Widely disseminated conference proceedings and newsletters are a form of publication, although they may not be archival. Publication or republication of a (perhaps revised) paper which has been widely disseminated is permitted only if the Editor judges that (a) the revision contains significant amplification or clarification of the original material or (b) there is a significant additional benefit to be gained from journal publication.

Authors are required to submit a statement describing the relationship of their TOCHI submission to their own most closely related prior papers (or concurrently submitted papers). This description should clearly state the unique contribution of the current submission relative to the authors' prior publications, or, if the paper has no relation whatsoever to prior papers, the statement should clearly say that. The author statement should be included with the submitted paper; it can appear directly after the other back matter such as references and appendices.

Please read and be aware of ACM's policies on these issues:

Prior Submission Policy

If your paper was submitted to another journal or conference before being submitted to TOCHI - even if it was revised after that prior submission experience, we require that you inform us of the prior submission in the cover letter.

Formatting and Preparing Your Manuscript

For Submission

Authors must submit manuscripts in PDF format. In order to create a PDF document, you will need access to Adobe Acrobat. We strongly recommend that you use the "press quality" or equivalent setting when creating a PDF version of your submission, which will ensure that the images embedded in your document are of the maximum resolution possible.

The use of the ACM format is not required for the initial submission, however we encourage authors to examine the ACM format to facilitate the conversion that will be necessary upon acceptance. More information can be found in the instructions for submitting a manuscript following acceptance below. It may also be useful to examine previous issues of TOCHI to see examples of writing, article organization, and citation style.

Before submitting a manuscript, please use a spelling checker and correct errors in punctuation, grammar, figure and table numbering, and so forth. The appearance of carelessness can prejudice reviewers.

Note about Figures and Tables in Submitted Papers: Please place all of your figures, tables and their captions in-line in your document at the approximate location where you expect them to appear in the final version. Submissions using out-dated formats that place tables, figures, and/or captions at the end of the document (presumably for typesetting purposes) will be returned to their authors.

Also remember the statement of previous research: Authors are required to submit a statement describing the relationship of their TOCHI submission to their own most closely related prior papers (or concurrently submitted papers). This description should clearly state the unique contribution of the current submission relative to the authors' prior publications, or, if the paper has no relation whatsoever to prior papers, the statement should clearly say that. The author statement should be included with the submitted paper; it can appear directly after the other back matter such as references and appendices.

Following Acceptance

The process for accepted papers is as follows:

TOCHI will request materials from you. Shortly after receiving your acceptance notice, you will receive a second e-mail from the TOCHI Information Director alerting you that the Manuscript Central site is ready for you to upload your final document materials. This includes source files (in Word or Latex), PDFs of the source files, high-resolution files (ideally EPS) for each of your figures, and a signed copyright form. While there is no enforced deadline for uploading your final materials, please keep in mind that your paper cannot be assigned to an issue until the materials have been reviewed by the Information Director and ACM.
Your paper will be assigned to an issue. The papers are assigned to issues four times a year, on or before March 15, June 15, September 15, and December 15. Papers waiting the longest are typically selected for the next issue, however other factors are also considered. For example, papers on a similar topic may be paired in an issue. Remember, papers cannot be assigned to an issue until their final documents are uploaded and approved.
The publisher will copy-edit and typeset your paper. The copyeditor will mark up your paper for grammar, punctuation, and structure errors and apply ACM style conventions. The typesetter will then enter the copyeditor's changes into your source file and typeset the paper using ACM fonts and style sheets. After the paper is typeset, you will receive a PDF proof along with the copyeditor's marked-up version of your paper to check for errors introduced by the copyeditor and/or typesetter. No other changes to the document will be allowed at this stage of final production, so it is important that your production files be prepared carefully.
Your paper will appear. Papers appear first on the ACM Digital Library, and later in print. Issues appear on roughly 3 month intervals: March, June, September, and December.

To help in the preparation of your final documents, please read the ACM Accepted Manuscript Preparation Guidelines.

Please also note that you must prepare your source files (text and bibliography) in LaTex or Word formatted in ACM style. Source files must be submitted, and no other other source file formats will be accepted by the publisher.

Note that you may submit additional electronic materials, such as benchmarks and source code, to be archived together with your paper in the digital library. In addition, you may use color graphics in the digital library. The print version will still be black and white, so please ensure your paper is easy to read in both formats.

To ensure proper indexing, classification, retrieval and dissemination, authors must include the following in the manuscript.

Descriptive title
Author names and affiliations
Abstract
ACM Categories and Subject Descriptors
Citations to relevant literature

The following are guidelines for the preparation of this material.

Descriptive Title

A title that accurately and clearly tells what the paper is about is generally the best. Cute or clever titles will not fare as well with the search engines and filters of the foreseeable future.

Author Names and Affiliations

Authors' names should be given without titles or degrees along with the name and address of the organization for which the work was carried out. The author's current address should be given in a footnote on the first page. Identify the contact author for co-authored work.

Abstract

The abstract should be 150 to 200 words and consist of short, direct, and complete sentences. It should be informative enough to serve in some cases as a substitute for reading the paper itself. It should state the objectives of the work, summarize the results, and give the principle conclusions, but omit future plans and citations. Try to avoid starting with the words "This paper ..."

ACM Categories and Subject Descriptors

Files must have ACM Categories and Subject Descriptors and as many of the 16 fixed ACM General Terms as apply. Please go to the ACM Computing Classification System (http://www.acm.org/about/class) for this. You may also supply any additional keywords and phrases you would like included.

Citations

Please examine Current and Past Issues for examples of proper citation format.

Submitting Your Manuscript

The ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) is now using the ACM ScholarOne Manuscript Central site to receive and process submissions. If you submit a non-PDF file that gets converted to PDF automatically on submission to the site, we suggest that you check the converted PDF file for errors.

When you submit you paper, please check that all authors of your paper are registered in ACM ScholarOne Manuscript Central site to be TOCHI reviewers. This is a requirement for submission. All authors who submit manuscripts to TOCHI are obligated to serve as referees in the review of other TOCHI submissions.

The Review Process

When we receive your manuscript and verify that it can be read and is within the scope of the journal, an Associate Editor will take responsibility for handling the review process. The Associate Editor will assign the article to 3-4 reviewers, study the reviews that are returned, and make an overall recommendation to the Editor. The contact author will be told the identity of the Associate Editor, but not the identities of the reviewers.

A manuscript submitted for the first time might be accepted or rejected, but most published articles first receive a "Revise and Resubmit" recommendation. If this happens, it may be very worthwhile to persevere, revising the manuscript to fix problems and clarify misunderstandings. Resubmissions should be accompanied with a cover letter that explains in detail how the comments of the reviewers were dealt with.

Accepted Manuscripts

If your submission is accepted for publication in TOCHI, the following process will be used to get your paper into the publication pipeline:

The Editor-in-Chief or an Associate Editor will accept the paper with a email message.
The paper then moves into an ACM production queue. ACM will process the submission and prepare it for publication in TOCHI. The author will be contacted by ACM during publication formatting. More details about this process can be found above in the section on formatting your paper following acceptance.

After Publication

Once your manuscript is published, we recommend that you use the ACM Author-Izer service. 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: http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service.

Presentations at CHI

All papers accepted to TOCHI will be invited to present at the annual CHI conference within a year following their publication. This allows journal paper authors to get greater exposure for their work, and allows people to take advantage of the greater continuity of the journal review process while still having their work presented at a prestigious conference.

The CHI conference that a TOCHI paper will be presented at is determined based on when the TOCHI paper is published, i.e. which issue it appears in on the digital library and in print. This criteria is used, as opposed to the time for acceptance for example, because we believe it is important for the paper being presented to be accessible to audience members. Papers that have been accepted but not published, would not be accessible to the audience.

What this means concretely is that TOCHI papers appearing at CHI must have been published in issues 2-4 of the previous year or issue 1 of the current year. For example, at CHI 2011 papers will be presented from TOCHI issues 17.2, 17.3, 17.4, and 18.1. (Volume 17 was published in 2010 and volume 18 is being published in 2011)

Note that while papers are invited for presentation, authors may elect to forego presentation. If you are the author of a TOCHI paper that is eligible for presentation at CHI, then you will receive an invitation e-mail in October or November of the year before the conference. Instructions will be provided in this e-mail explaining the process for presenting at CHI. This process involves submitting some additional information for the CHI program and CHI madness through the Precision Conference system.