Features of an IEEE Communications Magazine Paper

Abstract

Our community publishes peer-reviewed journal, magazine, and conference papers and articles sharing a commitment to originality and to quality content and writing. These papers vary in their characteristics and style, depending on their objectives and their targeted readership. The IEEE Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB) Operations Manual (OM) also provides guidelines differentiating these paper types. There is confusion sometimes, however, concerning the features of magazine papers in particular. Some authors, especially early-career authors, do not fully appreciate certain differences between magazine papers and their journal, transaction, and letter counterparts. This can create a challenge for magazine editors and may result in delay, or rejection, of papers that could have been accepted if written with a better understanding of what magazines are about. We focus our attention here on this issue as it applies to IEEE Communications Magazine (ComMag) in particular. Our goal is to help our new and/or young authors who want to publish in ComMag to customize their writing to the nature of this magazine and enable them to author papers with higher chances of acceptance.