Information for Authors

Author Checklist before submitting a paper:

1. Read the instructions below carefully;
2. Use the referencing and citation style of JRPIT;
3. Provide a PDF or ASCII Postscript file;
4. Provide a classification of your paper according to the ACM Computing Classification Scheme;
5. Suggest the most appropriate Associate Editor to handle your paper;
6. Suggest up to 5 referees (not Associate Editors) for your paper.

If your paper is accepted for publication in JRPIT, you will be then asked:

1. To sign a Copyright Transfer Form;
2. Provide your manuscript in Microsoft Word or LaTeX format;
3. Provide a hard copy of your manuscript;
4. Provide a short narrative biographical note (about 100 words);
5. Provide a high resolution (at least 300dpi) passport style photograph in jpeg format;

The Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology (JRPIT) is published quarterly by the Australian Computer Society. JRPIT invites original contributions in all areas of Information Technology including Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Systems, Information Engineering, and Telecommunications. These may be research papers, expository tutorial papers, industry case studies, book reviews, or short communications.

Each paper should comply with accepted practice, style and organisation for scientific papers; must be in English; and must be certified by the author that it is his or her own original work, that it has not been copyrighted, published or submitted for publication elsewhere. If the work described has been sponsored, the paper must be cleared for publication by the sponsoring organisation. Each author is asked to agree to assign copyright for the paper to the Australian Computer Society Incorporated. Where there is more than one author, each should sign the agreement regarding copyright.

Papers are submitted to the Editor-in-Chief, who will normally pass the paper on to an Associate Editor. The Associate Editor will decide if the paper is likely to be suitable for publication in this Journal and if appears to be, it will be formally evaluated for accuracy, originality and relevance by at least two referees.The refereeing process may take up to six months, and occasionally longer.

1. Papers will normally be equivalent to ten to sixteen printed pages (3,500 to 6,000 words). Longer papers may be accepted if space permits.
2. Short Communications (up to four printed pages) describing novel and/or topical applications, new ideas, work in progress or summarising postgraduate research theses accepted for degrees are also invited.

Manuscript Preparation

The first page should contain the title, author information (which should include affiliation, postal and email contact addresses), abstract and cross-referencing information. The title of the paper should characterise the contents of the paper in as short a span as possible. Author names should include no titles or degrees. If there is more than one author, the principal author should be listed first. For each author, a sufficient postal address (possibly including the name of an employer) should be supplied. The abstract should be informative and summarise the paper as concisely as possible in about 100 words.

Since an abstract may be republished separately, it should contain no uncommon acronyms, footnotes or reference citations. Cross-referencing information should consist of a list of Key Words and Phrases, and a classification of the paper according to the ACM Computing Classification System.

The main text should be clearly written and preferably follow the English conventions for spelling and punctuation. Subheadings and paragraphs should be clearly shown. Major and minor sections may be numbered at the author's discretion. Footnotes should not be used. (Reference citations should conform to the Harvard style with Author and Editor names capitalised - see below).

Tables should be constructed carefully and should be numbered consecutively. Each table should have a brief explanatory heading, and column headings should be brief and clear. Camera-ready copies for each figure, diagram or flow chart should be supplied. Drawings should be about twice the expected finished size. Legends and labels should be clearly drawn, positioned suitably and large enough to remain legible after reduction. Programs that illustrate the text or that convey important algorithms may be published. The proper location for each table and figure should be noted in the margin of the text.

Careful adherence to the Journal's style for citation and quotation of references is required. This is the Harvard style and has several advantages; the citations are not intrusive, they are often enough for the reader to recognise the work without further effort, and they may be added or deleted easily during drafting without disturbing any prearranged numbering scheme.

Citations in the main text should be made as in the following examples: 'It was shown by Agrewal et al. (1996) that...' or 'It has been shown elsewhere (Fayyed, 2001) that...' or 'It may be shown (e.g. see Knuth, 1973a) that...'. Note that the citation is composed of the author's last name and the year of publication. Where this is ambiguous, different works by the author(s) in the same year are distinguished by adding a single lower case letter to the year.

Only one level of parenthesis is used. The author's name appears outside the parentheses if the reference is direct, or inside if the reference is indirect. In the latter case, the name and year are separated by a comma. If there are two authors, both names are used. If there are three or more authors, then names for all authors should appear in the initial citation but subsequent citations may be abbreviated by replacing the second and later author narnes by the phrase 'et al.'. Thus, for example, a second citation of the book 'Newey, Stanton and Wolfendale (1978)' may be made as 'Newey et al. (1978)'.

References to unpublished works or private communications should be avoided. If these are desired, they should appear within the main text as e.g. 'Lone and Ryder (to appear)' or 'F.G. Smith (private communication)'. No accompanying entry should appear in the final reference list unless publication has already been arranged. Electronic sources should list author, title, URL and date accessed.

Full details for all references cited in the text (and no others) should be given in a Reference section at the end of the paper. Each entry must be sufficient to allow an ordinary reader to locate the reference without undue difficulty. Entries should be arranged so that the textual citations can be located readily, i.e. ordered alphabetically by author name and then year. The following illustrates the style of a reference list:

References
ALLEN, J.F. (1983): Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Communications of the ACM 26(11):832-843.
AGRAWAL, R., IMIELINSKI, T. and SWAMI, A. (1993): Mining Association Rules Between Sets of Items in Large Databases. Proc. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Washington DC, USA, 22:207-216, ACM Press.
BIRD, R. and WADLER, P. (1988): Introduction to functional programming. Prentice-Hall.
BRODIE, M.L. and RIDJANOVIC, D. (1984): On the design and specification of database transactions. In On Conceptual Modelling Perspectives from Artificial Intelligence Databases and Programming Languages. BRODIE, M.L., MYLOPOULOS, J. and SCHMIDT, J.W. (eds). New York, Springer-Verlag.
CLIFFORD, J. (1982): A logical framework for the temporal semantics and natural language querying of historical databases. Ph.D. thesis. State University of New York at Stony Brook.
HAN, J., ZAIANE, O.R. and FU, Y. (1994): Resource and Knowledge Discovery in Global Information Systems: A Multiple Layered Database Approach. Technical Report CSS/LCCR TR94-24. Database Systems Laboratory, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University.
MYSQL. (2001): The MySQL System. http://www.mysql.com. Accessed 21-Nov-2001.
STONEBRAKER, M. (ed) (1994): Readings in database systems. San Mateo, CA, USA, Morgan Kaufmann.
ZOBEL, J. and DART, P. (2000): Partitioning Number Sequences into Optimal Subsequences. Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology 32(2):121-129.

Authors are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of all details of all references quoted. Author names are capitalised (for prominence) with initials following the principal name; the year of publication is enclosed in parentheses and followed by a fullstop. For books and monographs, the fullstop is followed by the title (underlined or italicised ), a page reference (if appropriate), the name of the publisher, and the place of publication. For journal articles the fullstop is followed by the full title of the article (not underlined and without quotation marks), the name, or a standard abbreviation for the name, of the journal (underlined or italicised ), the volume number, the issue number within the volume, and the page number, range (introduced by the symbol 'pp.'). Journal titles appearing in citations should be abbreviated in accordance with accepted standards.

Final Manuscripts

When a paper is accepted, authors will be required to provide (i) an electronic version of the paper, (ii) a hard copy of the paper, and (iii) any original versions of photos, artwork etc.

Each author is asked to supply a short narrative biographical note (about 100 words) and a high resolution (at least 300dpi) passport style photograph in jpeg format for publication.

Papers that are accepted for publication will be typeset and, shortly before publication, a proof copy will be sent for checking to the (first) author. Symbols for correcting proofs may be found in the Style Manual published by the Commonwealth Government Printer, Canberra, pp.76-79 or, more conveniently, as neatly summarised by Conrad Taylor in PDF here. Authors should note that proof reading is intended to correct errors introduced by the editing and typesetting processes. Extensive changes or additions to an article introduced during proof reading may delay publication and be charged to the author. Corrected proofs must be returned promptly or publication cannot be guaranteed.

Fifty reprints of articles and a copy of the final journal issue will be supplied free of charge.

Acceptance and Copyright Form

The acceptance and copyright form must be completed and sent hardcopy to the Editor-in-Chief.

Papers and correspondence should be addressed to:

Professor John Yearwood, Editor-in-Chief
Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology
School of Science, Information Technology and Engineering
University of Ballarat

PO. Box 663, Ballarat, Vic., 3353

Australia

E-mail: jrpit@ballarat.edu.au

Authors are encouraged to submit their papers electronically. Electronic submissions are acceptable only in PDF or ASCII postscript. Authors are advised to send both formats, if possible.

If sending files electronically is difficult for some reason, send four copies of the paper to the Editor-in-Chief .

There should be a covering letter which includes the names and addresses of all authors and suggests which of the Associate Editors is most appropriate to select referees for your paper.

If you feel that it will be difficult to find referees for your paper, you are encouraged to suggest the names of about 5 competent referees (although there is no guarantee that any of these referees will be used).