SIAM Journal on Computing

(unofficial page by Oded Goldreich)

SIAM Journal on Computing (SICOMP) is published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. See the publisher's page.


When acting as editor for SICOMP, I usually forward the following three comments (regarding SICOMP's editorial policy) to potential reviewers.

THE JOURNAL'S STANDARDS

Editors usually ask the reviewers to apply high standards when evaluating the question of acceptance. But there is often unclarity or even confusion and non-uniformity regarding the question of what these "high standards" are. To calibrate the SICOMP standards, the editorial board has set the guideline that an accepted paper should be among the 100 best works done that year in the Theory of Computing at large. You may find it useful to think how this criteria translates to a requirement regarding a ranking within specific subareas. For example, I'd say that this means that a Cryptography acceptance should be among the 5--10 best works done in Cryptography in that year. (Of course, there are no quotas per area: I'm just trying to make the calibration more concrete.) Thus, SICOMP seeks to publish only the very best papers in each area, and expects other good papers to be published in specialized journals.

REASONABLE REVIEW TIME

Delays in all stages of the refereeing process have become a plague of TCS. The editorial board of SICOMP is determined to fight this phenomenon and I seek your help in this respect as well. Thus, unless there are extremely unusual circumstances, I'd like to ask you to submit your report within at most 3 months.

EDITORIAL STATEMENT (from the official charter)

The SIAM Journal on Computing aims to provide coverage of the most significant work going on in the mathematical and formal aspects of computer science and nonnumerical computing. Submissions must be clearly written and make a significant mathematical contribution, and be relevant to computer science. Topics include but are not limited to analysis and design of algorithms, algorithmic game theory, data structures, computational complexity, computational algebra, computational aspects of combinatorics and graph theory, computational biology, computational geometry, computational robotics, the mathematical aspects of programming languages, artificial intelligence, computational learning, databases, information retrieval, cryptography, networks, distributed computing, parallel algorithms, and computer architecture. In general, only original papers will be considered. However, papers previously presented in conference proceedings of limited circulation may be submitted in revised form. If a paper has appeared previously, in any form, authors must clearly indicate this in both their cover letter and in a footnote on the first page of the paper.


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