Publishing with IEEE is a key milestone for researchers, engineers, and academics, but the process can often feel overwhelming. That’s where the IEEE Author Center comes in as a comprehensive online platform designed to assist authors at every stage of their publishing journey. Whether you’re preparing your manuscript, navigating the peer review process, or promoting your published work, the IEEE Author Center offers essential tools and guidelines to help you succeed. From manuscript formatting and submission tips to insights on Open Access and copyright policies, this resource ensures your research aligns with IEEE’s high standards.
IEEE Photonics Society members and authors can especially benefit from the Author Center by accessing valuable resources that streamline the publishing process. The Society’s cutting-edge publications showcase the latest advancements in photonics research, featuring original, high-quality studies with some of the fastest submission-to-publication times in the field. This gives researchers a unique opportunity to quickly share their groundbreaking work with the global photonics community.
Each month, the IEEE Author Center offers valuable tips to guide you through the publishing process. We encourage our members to take advantage of these insights. In this month’s edition of the Author Center Newsletter (reprinted below), the center shares advice on crafting a compelling abstract, posting a preprint, and transforming a dissertation into a journal article.
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Tips For Crafting Your Article’s Abstract
A well-written abstract can encourage potential readers to invest time in reading your full article. Your abstract should provide a concise summary of the work described in the article, including a high-level view of the research conducted, the conclusions reached, and the potential implications of those conclusions. The abstract should be no more than 250 words and may be restricted to a single paragraph. Abstracts are expected to be “self-contained,” meaning that they do not include footnotes, references, undefined abbreviations, or equations.
Many authors prefer to start with a comprehensive draft of their abstract that is over 250 words and then refine it over several iterations, making it clearer and more concise each time, until it describes the article fully while meeting length requirements. Also, it may be easier to write the abstract after you’ve written the rest of your article to ensure that the abstract captures the entire article accurately.
While writing your abstract, consider the search terms that a reader might use to find articles on your topic. Including 3–5 of these keywords or phrases can help readers find your article and understand it more easily. However, avoid “keyword stuffing,” which is the practice of including too many keywords or repeating them so often that the language no longer flows naturally.
If you revise your article before publication, remember to revisit the abstract and confirm that it still describes your article accurately and completely.
You can find more information about writing your abstract and structuring your article in the IEEE Author Center or in our video tutorial about writing your title and abstract.
Learning the Rules about Preprint Posting
Posting your preprint (the draft version of your article, before formal submission to a journal or conference) can help you gain community feedback that can help you further refine your draft. If you have submitted your article to IEEE, or are planning to do so, you can post your preprint in the following locations:
- arXiv.org or TechRxiv.org
- Employer’s website or institutional repository
- Personal website
Add the following declaration to the first page of your preprint before you post it to one of the above locations: “This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.”
If your article is accepted for publication by IEEE, you will need to replace the posted preprint with either the full citation to the published article (including the Digital Object Identifier, or DOI) or the accepted version of the article, including the DOI and appropriate copyright notice.
Posting your preprint does not prevent you from publishing your article with IEEE. Preprint posting is not considered prior publication. Learn more about IEEE’s posting policies.
Adapt Your Dissertation into a Journal Article
While IEEE does not publish full dissertations, we will consider a journal article that’s based on a dissertation. Here are some helpful tips on how to rework your dissertation into a journal article.
- Determine the precise focus of your article. A dissertation might present both existing literature and new work across several research areas, but an article is expected to be much shorter and more narrowly focused on a single research question. In fact, some authors remodel their dissertation into two or three articles because their dissertation addresses too many research questions to present as a single article.
- Once you’ve identified your article’s focus, remove any text that is not directly relevant and shorten the remaining text by paraphrasing or summarizing wherever possible. Summarizing is especially important when adapting your dissertation’s comprehensive literature review into the more concise format found in a typical journal article.
- Referencing other works is another powerful way to streamline your article. For example, rather than describing each step of your research methodology in detail, you can refer the reader to the foundational work that first described the method you followed.
- Finally, update your reference list to include only the most relevant and recent references. (Note that your journal article must cite the dissertation that it is based upon.)
(From the Authors@IEEE Newsletter, Volume 10, Issue 2, March 2025.)
