IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

Information for Authors

Scope

The IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (TETCI) publishes original articles on emerging aspects of computational intelligence, including theory, applications, and surveys.

TETCI is an electronic only publication. TETCI publishes six issues per year.

Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts on any emerging topic in the field of computational intelligence, with particular emphasis on demonstrably novel techniques not covered by other IEEE Computational Intelligence Society journals. Illustrative examples include, but are not limited to, glial cell networks, artificial endocrine networks, artificial hormone networks, cultural learning, and non-fuzzy computing with words, with diverse applications of interest spanning computational neuroscience, brain computer interfaces, ambient intelligence, artificial life, social reasoning, IoT and other smart-x technologies. We also welcome manuscripts addressing contemporary challenges of the field, including issues of interpretability, privacy and security, adversarial learning and robustness, generalizable learning and optimization, as well as ethical dilemmas of machine intelligence.

Types of Contributions

TETCI publishes four types of articles:

  • Survey Papers
  • Full Papers
  • Short Papers
  • Letters (Comments on Published Papers)

Survey Papers are well-focused manuscripts that put recent progress into a broader perspective and accurately assess the limits of existing theories. A Survey Paper will typically be limited to 15 pages of formatted text in the IEEE two-column style (on exceeding this limit, mandatory over-length page charges apply).

Full Papers are characterized by novel contributions of archival nature in developing theories and/or innovative applications of emerging topics in computational intelligence. The contribution should not be of incremental nature, but must present a well-founded and conclusive treatment of a problem. Usually a Full Paper will be limited to 10 pages of formatted text in the IEEE two-column style (on exceeding this limit, mandatory over-length page charges apply).

Short Papers report new research avenues, as well as interesting theories and/or developments/results/simulations/experiments on existing work in emerging topics in computational intelligence, for example, an extension of existing results or algorithms, innovative applications of a known approach to interesting problems, interesting theorems on error bounds of algorithms, etc. The contribution should be conclusive and useful. A Short Paper will typically be limited to 6 pages of formatted text in the IEEE two-column style (on exceeding this limit, mandatory over-length page charges apply).

The term "Letters" will be reserved for just that, i.e., mostly for "Comments on Published Papers" and the authors' response, along with occasional letters to, or interesting tidbits for, the TETCI readership. A Letter will be limited to 3 pages formatted text in the IEEE two-column style (on exceeding this limit, mandatory over-length page charges apply).

No manuscript will be transferred from the Full Paper type to the Short Paper type after submission/review. A Short Paper will undergo the review process as a Short Paper. It would be the responsibility of authors to decide the type of their manuscript at the time of submission. If a manuscript is reviewed as a Full Paper and at the end of the review process, reviewers / Associate Editors (AE) / Editor-in-Chief (EiC) find it is not suitable to be reviewed as a Full Paper but a potential candidate for a Short Paper, then the manuscript has to be resubmitted as a Short Paper after revision, if authors desire to do so. Review management for Full Papers and Short Papers is under the direction of an Associate Editor, who will normally solicit four reviews and wait for at least three responses before a decision is reached. The review process is different for letters. An appropriate Associate Editor will assist the EIC in checking that the letter is "reasonable" (particularly for "Comments on"). If there is contention, the AE will solicit additional reviews. Then the EiC will make the acceptance decision. For "Comments on", the original author will be asked for a response. 

Submission of Manuscripts

Submission and review of manuscripts is now done through Manuscript Central, the IEEE's online submission and review system. Please log on to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tetci-ieee and follow the directions to create an account (if a first time user) and to submit their manuscript. If the manuscript is printable (all font embedded), it will be entered into the review process. Authors will be able to check on the status of their manuscript during the review process.

This TRANSACTIONS is primarily devoted to archival reports of work that have not been in the main-published realm elsewhere. Specifically, conference records and book chapters that have been published are not acceptable until and unless they have been significantly enhanced. In special circumstances or on exceptional occasions, the editor may deem a contribution noteworthy enough to be exempted from this policy. Authors will be asked to confirm that the work being submitted has not been published elsewhere and that it is not currently under review by another publication. If either of these conditions is not met or is subsequently violated, the article will be disqualified from possible publication in TETCI. Plagiarism in any form will be considered a serious breach of professional conduct with potentially severe ethical and legal consequences as defined in the IEEE PSPB operational manual, which can be downloaded from http://www.ieee.org/documents/opsmanual.pdf.

Professional Editing Services

Sometimes, TETCI receives submissions that suffer from poor English usage and readability. Such manuscripts often get rejected because of extremely poor readability. Authors, at their own cost, may utilize the help of American Journal Experts for pre-submission professional editing services. An author willing to get assistance with English grammar and usage prior to submitting his/her manuscripts for review or during the review process can go directly to https://www.aje.com/en to submit a manuscript for copy editing. Various levels of editing services are available. Cost estimates as well as required time, are available immediately online. It cannot be guaranteed that the linguistic quality of an edited manuscript will meet an author's expectations. As expected, an edited manuscript will undergo usual reviews.

Style for Manuscript

Here are some guidelines for article preparation. A list of 2-5 keywords and an abstract (described below) are required for all manuscripts submitted to TETCI. Manuscript Central contains the official IEEE keyword list. Using keywords from that list is preferred. Provide an abstract of reasonable length that is an informative summary of the paper, including any important results found or conclusions drawn. Authors are encouraged to put detailed derivations in appendixes. For the review process, a composite PDF file containing the main manuscript, tables, figures and appendixes should be submitted. All figures and tables must be inserted in the corresponding places. DO NOT (1) place all figures and tables at the end of the manuscript or (2) upload figures and tables separately.

For TETCI, mandatory over-length page charge will be imposed for pages in excess of 15 pages for a Survey Paper, 10 pages for a Full Paper, 6 pages for a Short Paper and 3 pages for Letters. These limits are excluding the supplementary materials. The manuscript length (excluding supplementary materials) with over-length page charge must be less than 21 pages for a Survey Paper, 15 pages for a Full Paper and 9 pages for a Short Paper. Please note that the limits apply to final accepted manuscripts that are prepared in standard two-column IEEE format. Some templates/style files that can help preparation of the manuscript can be downloaded from https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/create-your-ieee-journal-article/authoring-tools-and-templates/. 

Abstract Description and Specifications

In order for an abstract to be effective when displayed in IEEE Xplore® as well as through indexing services such as Compendex, INSPEC, Medline, ProQuest, and Web of Science, it must be an accurate, stand-alone reflection of the contents of the article.

The abstract must be a concise yet comprehensive reflection of what is in the article. In particular:

  • The abstract must be self-contained, without abbreviations, footnotes, or references. It should be a microcosm of the full article.
  • The abstract must be between 150-250 words.
  • The abstract must be written as one paragraph, and should not contain displayed mathematical equations or tabular material.
  • The abstract should include three or four different keywords or phrases, as this will help readers to find it. It is important to avoid over-repetition of such phrases as this can result in a page being rejected by search engines.

Ensure that the abstract reads well and is grammatically correct. 

Graphical Abstract

To aid readers, including reviewers, in understanding the key contributions of a paper, authors are encouraged to submit a graphical abstract along with their manuscript. A graphical abstract describes the motivation, key ideas and findings, and impact of the research. The graphical abstract can be submitted as supplemental material by uploading it with a supplemental file designation during the manuscript submission process. Like any supplemental material, the graphical abstract will undergo the peer review process. More details on graphical abstracts can be found at https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/create-your-ieee-journal-article/prepare-supplementary-materials/#graphicalabstract

Artificial intelligence (AI)-Generated Text (e.g., chatGPT)

The use of AI-generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text.

Page Charges

After a manuscript has been accepted for publication, the author's company or institution will be requested to pay a charge of $110 per printed page to cover part of the cost of publication. Page charges for this TRANSACTIONS, like those for journals of other professional societies, are not obligatory nor is their payment a prerequisite for publication. The author will receive 100 free reprints without covers if the page charge is honored. Corresponding authors from low-income countries are eligible for waived or reduced open access Article Processing Charges (APCs) (https://open.ieee.org/index.php/about-ieee-open-access/faqs/#waivers).

Mandatory Over-Length Page Charge

Effective from January 1, 2017, a mandatory over length page charge of $200 (per page) is required for every printed page in excess of 15 pages for Survey Papers, 10 pages for Full Papers, 6 pages for Short Papers and 3 pages for Letters published in TETCI. These limits are excluding the supplementary material. The manuscript length (excluding supplementary materials) with over-length page charge must be less than 21 pages for a Survey Paper, 15 pages for a Full Paper and 9 pages for a Short Paper. The page length here is for final accepted papers which have been formatted in two-column style. For the format requirements of new submissions, please refer to the above section "Style for Manuscript". 

Copyright

It is the policy of the IEEE to own copyright to the technical contributions it publishes. To comply with the IEEE copyright policy, authors are required to sign the IEEE Copyright Transfer Form before publication in either the print or electronic medium. The form is provided upon approval of the manuscript. Authors must submit a signed copy of this form with their manuscripts (after a manuscript is accepted for publication).

Submission of Final Manuscript

The final manuscript should be prepared with utmost care in the two-column IEEE Transactions print-format.

Page Numbers: Number all pages, including illustrations, in a single series, with no omitted numbers. Figures should be identified with the figure number.

References and Captions: Put all references at the end of your paper in IEEE style. Do not include figure captions on the illustrations themselves. Figure captions should be sufficiently clear so that the figures can be understood without detailed reference to the accompanying text. Axes of graphs should have self-explanatory labels, not just symbols.

Illustrations and Photos: Letters should be large enough to be readily legible when the figures are reduced to two or one-column width–as much as 4:1 reduction from the original.

Manuscript and Electronic File: For the final production of the manuscript, the author will need to provide a single zip file which contains all the source files of the peer approved version. Changes made to any paper version must be incorporated into the electronic version. Check that all files are complete, including abstract, text, references, footnotes, biographies (for Papers), and figures captions.

IEEE can process most commercial software programs but not page layout programs. Do not send postscript files. The preferred programs are TeX, LaTeX, and WORD (use standard macros). An IEEE LaTeX style file can be obtained by visiting the IEEE Author Digital Tool Box website, where standard IEEE LaTeX and Microsoft Word templates can be found.

Peer Review Model

The articles in this journal are peer reviewed in accordance with the requirements set forth in the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual (sections 8.2.1.C & 8.2.2.A) (https://pspb.ieee.org/images/files/files/opsmanual.pdf). Each published article was reviewed by a minimum of two independent reviewers using a single-anonymous peer review process, where the identities of the reviewers are not known to the authors, but the reviewers know the identities of the authors. Articles will be screened for plagiarism before acceptance.

Single-Anonymous Review

The articles in this journal are peer reviewed in accordance with the requirements set forth in the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual (https://pspb.ieee.org/images/files/files/opsmanual.pdf). Each published article was reviewed by a minimum of two independent reviewers using a single-anonymous peer review process, where the identities of the reviewers are not known to the authors, but the reviewers know the identities of the authors.

IEEE Preprint Policy

There are often questions about whether it is OK to post preprints of articles under review to arXiv or other preprint servers. Bottom line: it is fine to post to arXiv with certain conditions.

The PSPB Operations Manual contains the policies related to posting of preprints of articles submitted to IEEE publications.

First, here are some definitions (from p. 83):

  1. An author-submitted article is the version originally submitted by the author to an IEEE publication. An author includes a completed IEEE Copyright Form during submission of the article to an IEEE publication and thereby transfers the copyright of the article to IEEE.
  2. An accepted article is a version which has been revised by the author to incorporate review suggestions, and which has been accepted by IEEE for publication.
  3. The final, published version is the reviewed and accepted article, with copy-editing, proofreading and formatting added by IEEE.
  4. E-prints are digital texts of research articles. Electronic preprint is a form of an e-print where an author posts a draft article on the author’s or another web site. For purposes of this definition, a preprint is assumed to be the article in the form prior to submission to the IEEE, at which point copyright is transferred to IEEE. Authors who have submitted articles for publication by the IEEE may be interested in posting various preprint versions of the same article on e-print servers operated by third parties. E-print servers provide authors rapid dissemination of new results, with the opportunity of receiving comments from the peer community and with the opportunity to have a time-stamp associated with the announcement of results.


And now, the relevant policy (from Section 8.1.9, beginning on p. 82):

  1. IEEE seeks to maximize the rights of its authors and their employers to post preprint versions of an article on the author’s personal web site, on a server operated by the author’s employer, or on a server operated by an approved not-for-profit third party as specified in 8.1.9.G.2 below.
  2. IEEE allows its authors to follow mandates of agencies that fund the author’s research by posting accepted versions of their articles in the agencies’ publicly accessible repositories.
  3. IEEE does not restrict the rights of authors to use their IEEE-copyrighted articles in their own teaching, training, or work responsibilities, or those of their institutions or employers. In any preprint version archived by the author after submission, IEEE requires that IEEE will be credited as copyright holder. Upon publication of the work, authors are asked to include the article’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
  4. As indicated in Section 8.1.9.A.4 (above) and amplified in Sections 8.1.9.C through G below, IEEE’s policy for permitting posting of IEEE-copyrighted articles extends only to authors, their employers, approved third-party not-for-profit organizations, and IEEE organizational units. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office maintains a list of not-for-profit third party servers where material submitted to the IEEE may be posted. [The only approved third-party server is arXiv.]

E-Prints

Before submitting an article to an IEEE publication, authors frequently post preprints of their articles to their own web site, their employer’s site, or to another server that invites constructive comment from colleagues and provides a publication time stamp. Upon submission of an article to IEEE, an author is required to transfer copyright in the article to IEEE, and the author must update any previously posted version of the article with a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice (as shown in 8.1.9.B). Upon publication of an article by the IEEE, the author must replace any previously posted electronic versions of the article with either (1) the full citation to the IEEE work with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), or (2) the accepted version only with the DOI (not the IEEE-published version). IEEE shall make available to each author the preprint version of the article that the author can post and that includes the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), IEEE’s copyright notice, and a notice indicating the article has been accepted for publication by IEEE.

 

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