These guidelines are for authors intending to submit a paper to the Information Science Discussion Papers Series. While these guidelines are not binding, it would be helpful if authors could adhere to them as much as possible.
The current coordinator of the series is Nigel Stanger. Please contact him if you have any questions about these guidelines or the series as a whole.
The Discussion Paper Series is intended as a semi-formal vehicle for staff and/or students in the department to publish research in a timely manner. Papers typically reflect work in progress and may not include final results. Many papers that appear in the series are early versions of papers that are later published in conferences or journals. If you have recently submitted a conference or journal paper, we encourage you to forward a copy to the series coordinator for inclusion in the series.
The papers are sent to a selection of Information Systems departments at several universities in New Zealand, Australia and Asia. Copies are also archived in the Hocken Library, and where possible posted electronically on the Department’s web site. Papers published in the series reflect the research effort of the department, and due care should therefore be taken in their production.
We do not enforce a particular style on authors; many of the papers submitted to the series have also been submitted to conferences or journals, and must therefore adhere to the style requirements of the particular conference or journal. However, it would be helpful if authors could adhere to some basic formatting guidelines wherever possible.
Please use “standard” fonts such as Times/Times New Roman, Palatino, Arial/Helvetica, Symbol (Symbol) and LATEX’s Computer Modern, in the size range 10–12pt. Do not use non-standard fonts unless absolutely necessary, as this may complicate the production process.
Leave at least a 2.54cm (1 inch) margin around the body text, and ensure that margins are suitable for double-sided printing.
Include page numbers if possible, centered at the bottom of the page. (It may be possible to add these later if you submit the original source file(s) of your paper—see below.)
Please check your paper for grammar, spelling, correct cross-references, etc. If possible, get someone else to read the paper before submitting it. Most papers are not checked before publication.
There are no length restrictions as such, but we would prefer papers to be less than thirty pages in length, as larger papers are unwieldy to deal with. Particularly large documents could possibly be published as a departmental technical report instead.
You may submit papers in either hard copy or electronic form. We prefer electronic form so that the papers can be downloaded from our web site. Please email electronic submissions to the series coordinator. Hard copy papers should be given directly to the coordinator (Nigel Stanger). If you are submitting in electronic form, please use one of the following formats (in descending order of preference):
PDF is the most preferred format. However, there are some things you need to be aware of when generating a PDF file. First, if your paper contains bitmapped images, please disable “Downsampling” of colour and grayscale images, as this can render your images illegible. In Acrobat Distiller, these options can be disabled in the “Compression” section of “Job Options”. You do not need to disable downsampling of black and white images, as these are downsampled to a much higher resolution of 300dpi.
Second, if you use LATEX to produce your paper and use the Computer Modern fonts, you must generate the PDF file using PostScript versions of these fonts, or the PDF produced will be unreadable on screen. This problem can be avoided by using one of the alternate font packages, such as times or palatino.
If you are unsure about any of the above, please submit your original document(s) instead.
If you produced your paper using LATEX, you are welcome to submit the source (preferred) or the DVI file (or both).
If there is no other option, submit your original document(s) in whatever format you produced them in. Currently we can handle MS Office, OpenOffice, HTML and (probably) WordPerfect documents. It may be possible to handle other formats, but nothing is guaranteed.
Note that original document formats can often require considerable additional work in order to render them suitable for publication, which is why this is the least preferred option. Word documents in particular seem to cause all sorts of difficulties.