Category: Documentation

Submitting your LaTeX manuscript through the Editorial Manager (Springer and Elsevier)

LaTeX is an excellent tool for formatting your manuscripts. During the peer review process, most journals accept PDF files. But when it comes submitting your camera ready version, the Editorial Manager (EM), used by both Springer and Elsevier, insists on receiving a source file. The process has some problems and I would like to share some of the lessons I learned. First of all you need to know that EM will compile the LaTeX files for you. You do not need to upload your PDF or DVI files.

  1. EM is not able to digest figures in the PDF format. Convert all your figures to EPS. This can be achieved with Adobe Acrobat or Preview (MAC).
  2. EM is not able to deal with directories. All your files must be in one directory, including all figures.
  3. You can ZIP your complete LaTeX directory and upload it. EM decompresses all the files for you. Make sure that you do not include a PDF or DVI version of your manuscript, otherwise EM will include it as well. You will end up with multiple versions of your text in the final PDF.
  4. If EM encounters any problems during the compilation of your LaTeX files, it will write the log into the resulting PDF. You can find out what went wrong by looking at it.
  5. If an error occurred, EM has trouble with processing .tex files again which have the same name as in the previous attempt. Rename your .tex file (e.g. by adding a serial number) and upload it again. EM will then compile this new file instead of the old one.

Visualization of the General Terms used at the CHI conference

Niko Vegt visualized what general terms have been used to describe the CHI publications. His full report is also available. The term “Theory” appears to have the strongest fluctuations. “Human Factors” and “Design” appear to be pretty stable and “Experimentation” remains one of the least frequently used term.

CHI General Terms over time.

Statistics on the scientific staff members of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)

Me and a colleague from another department recently wondered if there were any structural differences between the nine departments at the TU/e. So I collected the information from out website as of today. The table below shows that Industrial Design is by far the smallest department and that we have the fewest associate professors (3). Biomedical Engineering has almost the same number of professors, but they have more than double the number of PhD students and teachers. Mechanical engineering does only list three teachers, which is well below average. The complete data is available.

faculty # phd pd teach. professor
# assist. assoc. full
industrial design 132 46 3 47 36 61.1% 8.3% 30.6%
biomedical engineering 286 108 26 110 42 35.7% 16.7% 47.6%
physics 277 163 32 19 63 31.7% 27.0% 41.3%
architecture 241 75 3 77 86 51.2% 19.8% 29.1%
chemical engineering 351 169 64 56 62 29.0% 29.0% 41.9%
mechanical engineering 251 142 31 3 75 42.7% 22.7% 34.7%
electrical engineering 325 137 39 63 86 38.4% 19.8% 41.9%
indust, eng. & inov. sci.novation
sciences		 238 73 9 50 106 55.7% 16.0% 28.3%
computer science 329 116 43 58 112 55.4% 13.4% 31.3%