As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
Author Guidelines
Regular: This is a classic research article that has a hypothesis, investigation, solution, model, physical experiment, and/or simulation and a result that is of value to the community within that area of expertise
Topical review: This is a review of an emerging area within the journal’s scope that performs a technical and critical review of other articles. Calculations are performed and conclusions are drawn on the strengths and weaknesses. The conclusion can also discuss future challenges.
Theory: This is a scholarly article that uses mathematical methods to develop new theoretical results of importance to the field.
Survey: A survey article analyzes, summarizes, systemizes, and presents fresh conclusions from a large number of recently published scholarly articles.
Perspective: This category of article is an in-depth viewpoint article intended to bring together a big picture in a fast-evolving landscape of technological development. It will typically be a topic where there is community uncertainty and/or disagreement. This category of the article will typically be written by a leading authority in an area.
Applied research: This article describes challenges and practical solutions for topics within the journal's scope. Quantitative results for validation of the approach are expected.
Negative result: This is a non-trivial theoretical or experimental negative or null result that does not support a hypothesis. Provided that the research question posed is meaningful and the study is rigorously conducted, this type of article has value to the engineering community.
Methods: This article will report the development of a new or improved fabrication or manufacturing technique, or a new experimental, measurement, or mathematical technique. Applied research articles focus on practical systems, while here the focus is on methods.
Comment: This is an article that comments on another published article. A comment points out a technical error, oversight, or presents an opposing position. It is a critique, providing corrections, and performs analyses.
Reply: A reply article is submitted by the authors of a published paper in response to a Comment article.