Style Requirements and Guidelines

These style requirements and guidelines are subject to change at the discretion of the editor as new situations arise and are dealt with.

Papers are accepted to ISEDJ based on the review conducted by the papers committee for ISECON each year. Once the paper has been accepted, it must then submit to the style requirements of ISEDJ. This provides an additional level of review, mostly for uniformity of formatting. Content evaluation falls outside the scope of style, and will not be considered. Format evaluation is directly within the scope of style and will be enforced.

Timeline: After your paper is accepted by the ISECON papers committee, the editor of ISEDJ will be notified and you will be invited to send a copy of your paper to ISEDJ. If there are any requests relating to your paper, typically due to style requirements not met, the editor will identify the requests and invite you to address them and resubmit your paper. Only in the most trivial or extreme circumstances will the editor actually change your paper, except to replace the v(n) in the masthead of your paper. This is because experience shows that small changes in the text can result in large and sometimes unwelcome changes to the overall appearance, particularly as regards page breaks. There is also a potential issue of editorial changes affecting the meaning of your paper. Expect to make the corrections yourself and resubmit the corrected paper. We do not require you to be in a great hurry, but we would like to publish your paper within the same calendar year that ISECON was held.

Paper Size and Margins: Articles should be formatted for printing on standard letter-size paper (8.5 by 11 inches) common in the US. International paper sizes such as A4 should not be used. Papers should be constructed to have margins of exactly 1.2 inches top, 1.1 inches bottom, 1.5 inches left, and 1.0 inches right, on each page. The top margin on the first page can be made to look bigger by inserting blank lines above the title.

Two Columns: The body of the article should be in two-column format with 0.3 inches between columns. The initial title, author list, abstract, and keywords should appear at the top of the first page and should span both columns. Wide tables and figures can also span both columns, and should include captions of the same width, but must not intrude into the margins of the paper.

Single Spaced: Format your document in single-spaced mode. Do not format it in double-spaced mode or 1.5 spaced mode.

Font Size: The font size for the body of the article should be no smaller than 9 points, and no larger than 12 points. 10-point font is requested and recommended. Uncommon fonts, if used, must be embedded in the article to facilitate making the PDF file.

Page Count: There is currently no limit to the number of pages in your document.

Use of Color: Many users have color printers. There is no restriction on the use of color in your document. You should be aware that many other users do not have color printers. You are advised to test printing of your document on a black-and-white printer such as a laser printer to verify that color elements print in an acceptable way. Some color tables, charts, and graphs, especially those with dark backgrounds, have been known to non-readable (solid black) after printing.

Original Document: Authors are encouraged to submit their original document in PDF format. This results in the most reliable printing for end users. Because many authors do not have the facilities available to create PDF documents, documents are also accepted in Microsoft Office (Microsoft Word) format (DOC), and will be converted by the ISEDJ editor. Please note that there have been format conversion problems in the past. In particular, page breaks have changed slightly, sometimes resulting in a nearly empty page in the middle of the document. It is believed that these artifacts are due to variation in fonts used by the authors as compared to those available to the editor and other end users. If you use obscure fonts in your document, you should provide your finished document directly in PDF format.

Transmittal: Transmittal of all documents should be by way of email attachment. Attachments should be sent using base64 encoding, which seems to be the default setting for most mailers except on Macintosh. Macintosh binhex format is not supported at the present time.

Cover Page: Your article forms its own special issue of ISEDJ. ISSN and library standards require a clear statement of the title of the publication on the front cover. The editor will insert a standardized cover page in front of your title page. The cover page is part of the edition, but is not part of your article. It serves as a table of contents.

Title: The title of the document should appear on the first page, centered, in mixed-case letters. DO NOT WRITE YOUR TITLE IN ALL CAPS. Main words should be capitalized. Acronyms may be in all-caps. Generally a title does not end with a period.

Good Example: This Is A Good Title Example

Good Example: This is a Good Title Example

Bad Example: This Bad Title Example Ends in a Dot.

Bad Example: THIS BAD TITLE EXAMPLE IS ALL CAPS

Bad Example: This bad title example is not capitalized

Authors: Each author should be identified by his or her normal publishing name. It is preferred that the name be spelled out in full, as in John Doe instead of J. Doe but either form will be accepted. Indications of rank and degree, such as "Assistant Professor" or "MBA" or "PhD" may be included with the name, but will not be preserved in the indexes.

A separate author's biography (including picture) will be requested and appended to the article. It is expected that you will wax eloquent in your bio, extolling your academic virtues and mentioning other items of human interest as you feel moved.

Author's institution should be provided on the first page, and will be indexed. Generally this is an educational institution. Authors are requested to also provide their departmental affiliations. These appear on the abstract page and the cover page, but departmental affiliations are not indexed. For authors that are not part of an educational institution, the institution will typically be a corporation name or the name of another organization. If an organization has a large geographic presence, it is acceptable to designate the city, state, or country of the branch where the author works, such as "Microsoft, Germany."

Author's location should also be provided and will be indexed to a depth of three: the primary index (required) is by country; the secondary index is by state or province; the tertiary index is by city. It is acceptable to have less than three levels of location, but in no case will more than three levels of location be indexed.

Author's email address is encouraged within the authorship block, but ISEDJ recognizes the problems many people are having with unsolicited commercial email (UCE, also known as SPAM), so it is not necessary to include an email address in your paper. An email address will be retained by ISEDJ to facilitate contact between ISEDJ and the author in the future, but this address will not be revealed beyond ISEDJ, and will be used only for purposes related to ISEDJ.

Date: You may include a date in the vicinity of the title and author lists, but it is not required. A date of publication will be assigned by the editor when final acceptance occurs. This date will appear on the cover page created by the editor.

Abstract: An abstract is required for each paper. The abstract should not exceed one half page (a maximum of 1000 characters). It should be formatted as a single, continuous paragraph. It should not contain any citations or references. The abstract will be included on the web page that links to the paper. It is appropriate to repeat abstract information elsewhere in the paper, especially within the first few paragraphs of the paper. One should design the paper to be read without the abstract, so repetition is normal and expected.

Keywords: A list of keywords is not required but is encouraged. Keywords will appear in an alphabetical list in the keyword index. Try to select words that people will be looking for, rather than words that you like. Remember, people will NOT look at your keywords and try to decide whether to read your article. It is the other way around. They will think of the keywords they are seeking. Then they will see your title and decide whether to read your article.

The editor may create or modify the list of keywords based on your abstract and title before creating the keyword index.

Figures and Tables: Figures and tables should have descriptive captions. It is generally expected that figures and tables are numbered in some way, especially if there are more than a few and they are not always close to where they are mentioned in the text. Remember that formatting problems can cause your table or figure to appear on a different page from the one you expected. This is a natural side-effect of using unusual fonts or differing versions of Microsoft Word. It seems like it shouldn't happen, but believe me, it does.

References: Citations should be indicated throughout your paper. References should not be shown in footnotes. Instead, all references should be collected into the final section of your paper, labeled either References or Bibliography. Full and carefully stated bibliographic references should appear, alphabetized by author.

Each citation should include a year of publication.

Web citations must include a full URL that works for the ISEDJ editor, as well as a date on which the URL was checked by the author. For long URLs, start the URL on a fresh line and break the line after a slash. Do not hyphenate URLs.

Please provide an ISSN or ISBN number in each citation, if such number exists. This makes it easier for readers of your paper to follow up with your sources when they want to find more information.

Publication

  http://isedj.org/volume/article/

  http://isedj.org/3/123/

Your paper will then be indexed by title, each author, each author's institution, each author's city/state/country, and each keyword or phrase.

Author's Biographical Sketch: Each author is strongly encouraged to provide a biographical sketch of approximately 100 words and a separate, current, high-resolution picture in jpg format. The author sketches will be composed as a separate page (more if there are five or more authors). The content of the sketch is flexible but must include author name and would typically include academic affiliations (degrees, institutions, current employment, academic rank) as well as research and teaching interests. It should be written in a friendly, flowing style.

The biographical sketches will be appended to your paper, forming a single PDF file that includes cover page, paper, and biographical sketches.

Author's Web Site: Each author is invited to specify an author's web site. If you provide this information, it will be included as a clickable link in the abstract page for your paper.

Paper's Web Site: A web site for the paper may also be designated. This could be handy if you wish to post additional materials that may be of interest to readers of your paper. If you provide this information, it will be included as a clickable link in the abstract page for your paper.

Copyright: Copyright in the Information Systems Education Journal is held by EDSIG, but copyright in the individual papers published within ISEDJ continue to be held by their respective authors. The following copyright statement must be subscribed to by the first author on behalf of all authors, and is attached to each paper.

Copyright in this work is retained by the authors. In the spirit of academic freedom, permission is granted to make and distribute unlimited copies of this document in its PDF or printed form, so long as the entire document is presented, and it is not modified in any substantial way.