General Information
All papers will be included in the ACM Digital Library. For any paper to be accepted into the ACM Digital Library, it must be submitted in an electronic format which conforms to ACM SIG formats using official ACM templates. Moreover, papers must adhere to ACM copy-editing rules. Finally, there are specifications of page and word limits imposed by GECCO. This information is detailed in the sections below.
The Full and Poster-only papers submitted to GECCO will be rigorously reviewed in a double-blind review process and they should be ANONYMIZED. This means that they should NOT contain any element that may reveal the identity of their authors. This includes author names, affiliations, and acknowledgments. Moreover, any references to any of the author's own work should be made as if the work belonged to someone else.
Page and Word Limits
Full papers
Maximum number of words in the abstract: 200. Maximum number of pages: 8.
Poster-only papers
Maximum number of words in the abstract: 200. Maximum number of pages: 2.
Late-Breaking Abstracts
Maximum number of pages: 2.
Hot Off the Press
Maximum number of pages: 2.
Competition Entries
Maximum number of pages: 2.
Student Workshop Papers
Maximum number of words in the abstract: 200. Maximum number of pages: 4.
Workshop Papers
Maximum number of words in the abstract: 200. Maximum number of pages: 8.
ACM Formats and Templates
Submissions that do not conform to the ACM SIG standards, templates, and formats will be returned to the author for corrections and/or alterations. The page size for this ACM publication is US Letter (8-1/2x11 inches). The required ACM templates can be downloaded from these links for LaTeX, WORD (Windows) and WORD (Mac 2016). More general templates are available at ACM.
| WORD INSTRUCTIONS | (a) Use the ACM template (see download link above). Specifically, use the sigconf template style. |
| (b) Be sure to format your document for American Letter (8-1/2x11). Please check that your submission adheres to the set page limit for your type of submission (see above). | |
| (c) Insert the ACM copyright statement that you receive back from ACM after completing the copyright process (it will look similar to this GECCO-blurb.txt). This statement should appear in 8 pt. Times New Roman, justified text, with GECCO'18 (the venue acronym made italic). | |
| (d) Distill/Create an ACM compliant PDF. If your submitted PDF file is not ACM Compliant, we will distill your .doc or .docx file with the ACM distilling settings, send the PDF to the contact author for approval, and use the PDF for the proceedings and the ACM DL. | |
| (e) Upload your PDF file. We recommend using a modern, standards-compliant Web browser to upload the necessary files. | |
| (f) IMPORTANT: Alongside the camera-ready PDF’s, you will be required to collect and submit the source files for each paper – all files which were used to create the final output (PDF), be they Word, LaTeX, image files, etc. Submission of source files was always a requirement, albeit one that was hardly enforced in the past. In anticipation of serving both accessibility compliant PDF and responsive HTML5 formatted files from the ACM Digital Library, ACM is now enforcing this requirement. | |
| LaTeX INSTRUCTIONS | (a) Use this ACM template (see download link above). |
| (b) Include the following three (3) lines in your .tex document to produce the correct conference information to appear on the front page: | |
| (c) You MUST use Type 1 fonts for your submission, for help on obtaining the correct type of fonts and other formatting issues, see: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. | |
| (d) Distill/Create an ACM compliant PDF. If your submitted PDF file is not ACM Compliant, we will distill your .ps (postscript) file with the ACM distilling settings, send the PDF to the contact author for approval, and use the PDF for the proceedings and the ACM DL. | |
| (e) Upload your PDF file. We recommend using a modern, standards-compliant Web browser to upload the necessary files. | |
| (f) IMPORTANT: Alongside the camera-ready PDF’s, you will be required to collect and submit the source files for each paper – all files which were used to create the final output (PDF), be they Word, LaTeX, image files, etc. Submission of source files was always a requirement, albeit one that was hardly enforced in the past. In anticipation of serving both accessibility compliant PDF and responsive HTML5 formatted files from the ACM Digital Library, ACM is now enforcing this requirement. |
Copy-Editing Rules
| Bad Breaks | Be sure that there are no lines going outside the column margins. Also make sure there are no bad page or column breaks. This means no widows (last line of a paragraph at the top of a column), no orphans (first line of a paragraph at the bottom of a column). If this happens either tighten the previous column or force a line over. Section and Sub-section heads should remain with at least 2 lines of body text when near the end of a page or column. |
| Images & Figures | (a) Colors and Black & White (Gray Scale) Print Testing. If you have any images in color, we suggest that you print your paper to a black/white printer (or black-white version) to be sure that the tones and screens used in your images or figures reproduce well in black and white. Your images will appear in color in the electronic proceedings in the ACM Digital Library. |
| (b) Resolution & CYMK. We recommend images to be at least 300 or 600 dpi for quality reproduction and saved as .tif images. When creating or revising your images for inclusion in the paper, please be sure you choose CYMK and not RGB (as the color profile choice). | |
| (c) TIF (EPS) vs JPG (JPEG) images. TIFs were (and should be) created for pre-press applications where quality takes priority over file size. While TIFs can be compressed (LZW compression option when saving out of Photoshop, for example), no image data is lost, thus ensuring maximum quality. JPEG was designed as a compressed image format designed to keep the file size small which makes it ideal for use in web graphics. To do this, the JPEG format actually deletes image data from the image. The higher the level of compression, the more data is removed. This is referred to as a lossy compression system. On a printout, the removed data tends to show up as blocky areas of a solid color. At higher resolutions (a minimum of 200 dpi), there's usually enough data in the JPEG file for the compression artifacts to be very noticeable. | |
| (d) Rules/Lines. We recommend for quality reproduction of rules in your graphs, tables or charts, that the rules are at least a 0.5 pt. and black. Finer lines and points than this will not reproduce well, even if you can see them on your laser printed hardcopy when checked — bear in mind that your laser printers have a far lower resolution than the imagesetters that will be used. | |
| (e) Fonts. If your figure uses custom or any non-standard font, the characters may appear differently when printed in the proceedings. Remember to check your figure creation that all fonts are embedded or included in the figure correctly. | |
| (f) Transparencies. If a figure or image is assembled from multiple images, the images must be embedded, layers flattened or grouped together properly in the file, not lined. Transparencies should also be flattened. | |
| Page Numbering, Headers, & Footers | Your final submission SHOULD NOT contain any footer string information at the bottom of each page. The submissions will be paginated in a determined order by the chairs and page numbers added to the PDF during the compiling, indexing and pagination process. |
| ACM Classification Sections | (a) The sections CCS Concepts (ACM Computing Classification System) and Keywords are mandatory to be included on the first page of your submission. |
| (b) CCS Concepts. Make sure that your selection included on the first page of your paper are also chosen properly on the paper submission page. Click here for information on the ACM Computing Classification Scheme. | |
| (c) Keywords. The contents of this section is at the author's discretion. Be sure to pick terms that fit your work well as they will be used to index your work. |