Submission Guidelines
Material Published
The material to be published in the Transactions of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering will be of a reference or archival nature in the field of mechanical engineering or related disciplines. It will include:- papers reporting on fundamental research;
- papers reporting on the development of design methods that constitute an original contribution to design;
- review papers that provide a significant evaluation of, and perspective on, recent developments;
- notes reporting interim work, or work not warranting a full paper, on original research or design;
- letters to the editor will also be considered.
Requirements for Initial Submissions
- Manuscripts may be submitted in English or French.
- The manuscript, as a single PDF file, should be e-mailed to the Editor (paul@cim.mcgill.ca).
- The authors must clearly state that their paper is original and has not been submitted or published elsewhere (CSME Forum and CANCAM conferences are exempt).
- The text should be single-spaced, in 8 1/2" x 11" (letter) format. All margins should be about 1". Pages should be numbered. Sans serif and exotic type faces should be avoided.
- Titles should be brief. The complete name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s) should be given below the title (e.g., "John W. Smith" rather than "J.W. Smith").
- Symbols used should conform to those recommended by the American National Standards Institute.
- All figures should be clear and legible. Diagrams should be as simple as possible.
- References should be numbered in the order in which they appear in the paper and should be referred to as "Smith and Jones [1]," or "Hervé et al. [2]," or simply as in "as proved in [3]." They should be listed at the end of the text and arranged as follows:
[1] Smith, J.J. and Jones, A.B., "Title of paper," Unabbreviated Journal Name, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-20, 2001.
[2] Hervé, J.-M., Lefèbvre, S. and D'Artagnan, T., Book Title, 2nd ed., Springer, 2002.
[3] Miloševic, V., "Title of paper," Conference Name, Paris, France, pp. 1-20, July 12-16, 2009.
Requirements for Final Submissions
Upon acceptance of the paper, the manuscript will be returned to the corresponing author for final preparation. The final manuscript should be submitted as a single MS Word file or as a LaTeX file and a PDF file. If using MS Word for preparing the final manuscript, the TCSME's MS Word template should be used. If using LaTeX for preparing the final manuscript, the TCSME's LaTeX template should be used.All figures and tables should be additionally submitted as TIFF or JPEG files. If the desired dimensions of a figure or a table in the paper version of the journal is to be x mm by y mm, then the minimum dimensions of the image file should be 12*x pixels by 12*y pixels. Obtaining satisfactory image quality through multiple iterations between the assistant editor and the authors of a manuscript is cause for considerable delays in the publication process of many manuscripts. The following guidelines should help those authors who are less familiar with image manipulation.
Images of figures and tables are most commonly (and most easily) generated by a screen capture. If that is the method chosen, probably the best free image manipulation program for doing this (and much more) is GIMP. This software runs on most operating systems. To generate a screenshot, the image to be captured should first be displayed on the screen as large as possible (i.e., occupying most of the computer display). For example, in the case of a table in a PDF file, the PDF file should be opened and the area of the table zoomed. In the case of a gigure in Matlab, the window of the figure should be maximized but the font of all text annotations (labels of axes, legends, etc.) should also be increased. Then GIMP should be started, and a screen shot window activated (File->Acquire->Screen Shot). The option "Grab the whole screen" may be selected, in which case the whole screen is captured and pasted into a new image file. Then using the Crop Tool, the area of the table/figure (excluding the caption) should be selected to produce an image containing only the table/figure. Finally, the file should be saved (File->Save As) as a TIFF image, simply by entering the file name ending with the extension ".tif." In the options window, the LZW (lossless compression) should be selected.
JPEG format should be used only for photos that were not edited in an image manipulation program (i.e., if the JPEG images is copied directly from a digital camera). This format should be avoided because it deteriorates the quality of the image due to the use of so-called lossy compression.
Images in TIFF (or JPEG) format can also be produced by exporting a figure from the program that produced that figure (e.g., from MS Visio or from Matlab). In most cases, however, it is easier to use the screenshot method described above.
Here are several examples of images that are of unsatisfactory quality:
- BadExample1.jpg (good image dimensions - 1050 x 746 pixels - but unreadable tiny text anotations)
- BadExample2.jpg (the original figure seems to be excellent, but the image dimensions are too small)
- BadExample3.jpg (again, the image dimensions are too small)
- BadExample4.jpg (again, the image dimensions are too small, the gray background should be removed, and the figure cropped to remove the excessive white margins and the label "Fig. 1")
- GoodExample1.jpg
- GoodExample2.tif
- GoodExample3.tif
- GoodExample4.jpg
- GoodExample5.jpg
- GoodExample6.jpg
- GoodExample7.jpg (though, the caption "Figure 7:..." should not appear in the image)
Page Charges and Reprints
When submitting manuscripts, authors must state in writing their intention and ability to pay (or not to pay) page charges. Any manuscript received without this statement will be discarded without acknowledgment. Furthermore, due to financial constraints, the Editor reserves the right to limit the publication of unpaid, accepted articles to one per author per year. This applies to all the authors of a coauthored article. A charge of C$35 per page will be made to help defray the cost of publication. This amount is charged to the institution or a contract supporting the research reported in the published paper. In no case is the author expected to pay the charge, nor is publication dependent upon payment of the page charges. When the paper has been published and the voluntary page charges have been paid, the corresponding author will receive a the PDF file of the paper.
