Publication Guidelines
Publication Scope
Software Engineering Notes (SEN) does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Do not send a completed manuscript unless the editorial team has invited the contribution or approved it in advance.
SEN publishes editor-managed columns and may invite guest contributions that discuss topics of interest to SIGSOFT members and the software engineering community. A column is not a venue for reporting original research in the form of a conventional research paper. Columns should normally be no longer than four pages and should encourage further discussion among community members.
Scientific or research articles are published only as part of a workshop for which SEN has agreed in advance to serve as the publisher. Unsolicited research articles that could be submitted to a conference, workshop, or journal will not be considered. Workshop summary reports may also be published by prior arrangement with the editorial team.
Questions about an invited or pre-arranged contribution may be sent to editors_sigsoft [at] acm.org.
Authors preparing an invited or pre-arranged contribution should use SEN style and provide the source files and a PDF with all fonts embedded. The following templates are available:
Authors are warmly encouraged to carefully structure the abstract of their manuscript, so as to ensure that it reflects the key points addressed in the document, which will appear in full in the ACM Digital Library. Authors are also encouraged to use the keywords found on the ACM Computer Classification System (CCS) that is available online.
Production Deadlines
SEN appears quarterly (four issues a year). For contributions arranged in advance, final materials are normally due four weeks before the publication date:
- November 30 for the January issue
- February 28 for the April issue
- May 31 for the July issue
- August 31 for the October issue
Publication Terms and Conditions
By submitting an invited or pre-arranged contribution for distribution in SEN, you grant ACM the following non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide rights:
- to publish in print on condition of acceptance by the editor,
- to digitize and post your article in the electronic version of this publication,
- to include the article in the ACM Digital Library, and
- to allow users to copy and distribute the article for non-commercial, educational or research purposes.
However, as a contributing author, you retain copyright to your article and ACM will make every effort to refer requests for commercial use directly to you.
By submitting an invited or pre-arranged contribution for distribution in SEN, you also agree that:
- at this time, you, or one of your co-authors, have not submitted this article for review/acceptance in any other conference, workshop, symposium, or publication, and
- should your article be accepted for publication in SEN, you, or one of your co-authors, will not submit this article to any conference, workshop, symposium, or publication.
Finally, all contributions are considered personal rather than organizational; technical contributions are considered as unrefereed working papers. Controversy is encouraged, whilst personal attacks are discouraged.
On Plagiarism
Please see the ACM webpage about plagiarism and self-plagiarism.
Plagiarism is copying words from another published paper (your own or someone else’s) without proper quotes and citations. In writing, everything not quoted and cited is presumed to be new work by the author. Plagiarism disrespects both the original author (whose contributions are not acknowledged) and the reader (who is mislead about the contributions of the current paper, and will not know where to go when they want to learn more). It looks like theft of words or ideas.
Any copied text longer than a few words should be put in quotes and given a reference. If you copy more than a full sentence, use indented paragraphs to denote a block quote. Note that copying text and then changing words here and there is not good enough. Use quotes or rewrite completely.