Authors of Technical Papers should prepare their documents according to the ACM SIGGRAPH publication guidelines. Please pay particular attention to the citation format for prior ACM SIGGRAPH conference papers, as specified in the ACM SIGGRAPH publication guidelines, because the proper format varies depending on the year of publication.
Authors are required to submit fully formatted papers, with graphs, images, and other special areas arranged as intended for final publication, using the ACM SIGGRAPH paper preparation guidelines. Be sure that all pages are numbered and that the first page contains your paper's ID number, in the place where authors' names normally go (below the paper title). You should obtain this paper ID by completing the Online Submission Form before finalizing your paper. If your paper is accepted, you will receive instructions for formatting the final version, which will be different, because, among other things, the authors' names and affiliations will be included, and the pages will not be numbered.
Authors must submit their papers electronically. The only allowable format is Adobe PDF. We prefer that authors upload supplemental materials (anything except the paper) electronically, but physical submission is also possible. If there is some reason why electronic submission is impossible for you, please contact us via the Technical Papers Email Contact Form well before the deadline. See How to Submit for more information. For videos, we strongly encourage QuickTime MPEG-4 or DivX Version 6, and for still images, we strongly encourage JPG or PNG. If you use another format, you are not guaranteed that reviewers will view them. In preparing videos, please choose a reasonable frame size and rate, but be prepared to submit higher-resolution video if a section of your video is selected for the Papers Preview section of the Electronic Theater (see How to Submit). If your supplemental materials amount to more than 100 MB of data, you are not guaranteed that reviewers will download and view them.
Anonymity
Remove any information from your submission materials (paper, video, images, etc.) that identifies you or any of the other authors, or any of your institutions or places of work. In addition to not listing your names and affiliations in the paper, please omit acknowledgements (you will be able to add them back upon acceptance.) If you are a well-known author, don't narrate your video; get someone else to do it. You must reference all relevant work completely, however, including your own and that of the other authors. The detailed policy on how to cite these papers, were they already published, submitted to publication, or online prepublications (arXiv, technical reports, theses, etc.) is described in Submission Policy. Please read it carefully before submitting your work.
Do not include URLs referring to web sites that contain vital material for your submission. Such material won't be considered, since reviewers cannot access it without endangering the anonymity of the reviewing process.
Please keep the PDF version anonymous; in particular, note that under some operating systems the "properties" of a PDF file may contain the creator's name. Also, Version 7 PDF files allow inclusion of a script that will contact the author each time the file is opened. Do not include this script in your PDF file; if we find it, we will reject your paper without review.
For more information, see the anonymity section of the Submission Policy.
Paper Length
There is no arbitrary maximum (or minimum) length imposed on papers. Clearly, writing plays an important role in assessing the quality of the paper submission. Papers may be perceived as too long if they are repetitive or verbose, or too short if they omit important details or tamper with formatting rules just to save on page count. Have a look at previous proceedings to get a sense of the range of paper lengths, where typical lengths are between 8 and 10 pages, but the variation is large. The page length need not be an even number.
Once the Technical Papers submission deadline has passed, it is expected that if your paper is accepted, its length will not change. If you wish to substantially modify the paper during the revision cycle, or if you wish to add any pages to the length of your paper, you must first obtain permission from your primary reviewer. Be aware that primary reviewers will typically deny such requests unless the terms of conditional acceptance of the paper can reasonably be understood to require it.
Companion Videos
Papers may be accompanied by a video that is five minutes or less in duration. In recent years, well over half of the accepted papers were accompanied by some kind of video material. To the extent possible, accepted papers should stand on their own, with the video providing supplementary information or confirmation of results. However, it is fine to refer to the video in the paper, in which case the video should be submitted in the public areas of the supplementary materials form, as described below. Such a public video should not be included in a submission unless substantively similar footage can appear in the ACM Digital Library. If your paper is accepted and you cannot comply with this requirement because of copyright or permission problems, your acceptance will be rescinded.
Supplemental Materials
Authors are invited, but not required, to include supplemental materials such as executables and data files so that reviewers can reproduce results in the paper, images, additional videos, related papers, more detailed explanations, derivations, or results. These materials will be viewed only at the discretion of the reviewers, who are only obligated to read your paper itself. These materials should be anonymized, so that they can be made available to all reviewers; materials whose authorship can be readily ascertained will be seen only by members of the Technical Papers Committee. There are three separate areas in the online submission form for uploading supplementary materials:
- Anonymous supplemental materials that are considered part of the submission, and that you are committing to provide for the ACM Digital Library if your paper is accepted.
- Anonymous materials that you are submtting to help in the review process but do not plan to submit to the Digital Library.
- Non-anonymous materials for PC members only, which are not part of the submission.
For instance, in addition to videos, A) may include some code, and a .zip archive containing result images and some text files, such as detailed user-study results or other appendices associated to your submission. B) may include related papers from the same authors currently under review or in press elsewhere, together with a cover letter that outlines the differences between the submission and these other papers. In case of resubmission with reviewer continuity, the cover letter explaining how you took into account previous reviews and listing the improvements in your method should be there, too. If you need to include non-anonymous supplemental materials, C), be aware that they will only be accessible to the Technical Paper Committee members, and please add a cover letter indicating why you are including them. For more information, see Submission Policy.
Resubmissions
If your paper is a revision of a paper that has previously been submitted to a SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia conference, we recommend (but do not require) that when you fill out the submission form you identify it as a resubmission, and select the option that allows the previous review materials (reviews, reviewer identities, BBS discussions, etc.) to be made available to the Technical Papers Committee. If you choose to use this option, your paper may be assigned to some or all of the previous reviewers, and all reviewers will have access to suitably anonymized versions of the review materials of all prior submissions. We encourage you to choose this option if you consider the paper to be derived from the previous version, even if the paper has been substantially rewritten and authors have been added, because it will result in more consistent reviews, and decrease the chance that a new set of reviewers will want completely different changes than those you made in response to the reviews of your earlier submissions. This option also has the added side benefit of reducing the overall burden on the volunteer reviewing community. Note that simply responding to all earlier criticisms will not guarantee acceptance. If you resubmit with reviewer continuity, you should include a cover letter within the anonymized supplementary materials, to explain the changes you made to the paper and how you improved your work and its exposition since the last review cycle.
Permissions and Copyrights
You must have permission from the owner or copyright holder to use any images or video that you do not own in your submitted paper or supplementary material. ACM has a clear policy, and procedures, for handling third-party material. If your submission is accepted, you will be asked to provide a signed copyright form, which is required by ACM before your paper can be published. The contact author of each paper will receive an email message from ACM Rights Review containing instructions and a link to the copyright form, which is completed online.
Authors of accepted Technical Papers are required to complete the ACM Rights Management Form prior to publication. They are also required to upload final versions of all of all public supplementary materials that were originally part of their submission
