Picture the following situation: you as a VIS PC member sit in front of your computer and have to bid on 500 to 600 papers (or maybe even more this year). For each of them you see the title, the keywords the authors have assigned, and the abstract. The list is pre-sorted by your own experience (that you recorded via keywords, just like the authors of the submissions did for their papers), but this sorting is not completely reliable and frequently there are relevant or even highly relevant papers for your expertise that end up low in the list. So ultimately you need to go through all the papers, and see which papers you would like to review, can review, or don’t want to review at all for lack of expertise. You probably make some decisions simply based on the title (so hopefully the authors chose a good and descriptive title), yet for many you need to read the abstract. Now guess what most reviewers are doing (and we are making assumptions here based on our own experience): they are searching each abstract for precisely three words: “In this paper, …” (or similar expressions). The reason is that the sentence or two that start(s) right at this point is/are telling you what this paper is really about. Not the many sentences before that tell you what’s wrong in this world and how important it is that these problems get fixed—you as a PC member are (hopefully) already an expert on these problems that require that we create new and better visual representations and interactive data exploration systems. Unfortunately, these essential sentences are often hidden somewhere in the middle and even occasionally toward the end of the abstract, which makes the PC member’s job quite tedious.

This situation illustrates a tendency that many of us have to write our technical papers and parts or them in a WHY-HOW-WHAT fashion:¹WHY do we need to change things, HOW do we do it, and WHAT does this now mean. Yet this structure does not really support the reader who likely wants to learn something new: by the time they get to WHAT you have done they may have lost the motivation because they had to dig through all that WHY this is important (potentially repeating what they already know) and the part on HOW you achieved your contribution (which they will have troubles understanding because they do not know where the whole journey is taking them). A better structure often is to write your paper in a WHAT-WHY-HOW style: start with a clear but brief statement on what you have done, then comes a bigger part on why this is important, and then the glory details on HOW you achieved your contributions.

This structure can apply at different levels of paper writing. For example, the abstract and some part of the introduction often serve the WHAT function, another part of the introduction and the related work section represent the WHY part,² and the remaining core sections of the paper provide the details for the HOW part. But not only for the paper, but also, in particular, for the abstract. We recommend that you start your abstract with one or two clear sentences about WHAT you do, then could come a few sentences on WHY this contribution is important and needed, and then finally the rest of the abstract can talk about HOW you achieved it and your key results. This structure not only makes it much easier for future readers of your paper to remain interested, it also makes it much easier for potential reviewers of your paper to understand what it is about—hopefully convincing the right reviewers to bid on your papers.

Now let’s picture a new situation and assume that the bidding process is finished, and reviewers have been assigned to your paper, who are now reading and evaluating it. Of course, even at this point (we presume) you want to make it as easy as possible for them to understand what you have done, and how innovative and important your contributions are. Let’s assume that the reviewer reads something along the following lines: “The literature was analyzed and a new approach was designed. A tool that creates a suitable visualization was implemented in Python. In the study that was conducted with the tool, each participant was given 10 questions. Sample groups were arranged.” If, as a reviewer, you are like us then you are puzzled. You ask yourself: who analyzed the literature? The authors or some survey they cite? Who designed the new approach? The authors or somebody else (who)? Who actually designed and conducted the experiment? The authors or some external company they haven’t mentioned yet? And who talked to the participants? And so on.

The problem here is that this text was written in what is called passive voice. Many of us have the tendency (or are even taught!) to use passive voice to describe what they did. But for a scientific paper this way of writing often hides the person who is actually acting, making this very point difficult to understand—yet this is precisely what you want to communicate: you the authors realized the important new contributions. A better way to communicate this point is to use what is called active voice, where you clearly state who did what: “We analyzed the literature and designed a new approach. We implemented a tool in Python to create a suitable visualization. We used the tool in a study, in which we gave each participant 10 questions. We arranged sample groups.” Now everything is clear beyond a doubt for your reviewers and for future readers of your paper. And, as an added benefit, you may notice that this way of writing (typically) uses less space than the passive-voice version. But more on space use in papers in a later blog post.

For the time being we hope that these thoughts help you prepare better submissions for this year’s conference, in addition to the previously posted guidelines on how to make your paper reviewer-friendly such as selecting appropriate keywords or providing hyperlinked DOIs for all the references in your paper.

Footnotes

1. We want to acknowledge that this insight is not our own, but we learned about this from our own academic mentors, who credit the initial recommendation to Trevor Pering. ↩

2. Therefore, your related work discussion should also always make a connection to your own work, only then it serves this motivational WHY function. ↩

In this blog post we want to touch on the actual creation of your paper PDF, and on some information that should be reported in the paper, and how.

First, the PCS system is now open for you to create your paper submissions. We are looking forward to seeing many of them. In this context we also need to announce a small change to what we had initially communicated in the previous blog post: rather than having a separate, optional field for the paper plus appendix upload we allow the main paper upload to directly include the paper appendixes as well. That means that you paper still, like in previous years, can only have up to a maximum of 9 pages of main text plus you can fill the rest of your paper up to a maximum of 11 pages with references (with acknowledgements, additional material points, and figure credits being allowed on pages 10 and 11). In contrast to previous years, however, you no longer have to cut off your appendices and upload them as a separate file, they can be included in the main document, can be cross-linked to the main text, and do not count toward the 11-page limit. (We also updated the previous blog post accordingly.) Please note that this change only applies to the reviewing phase, however. For a potential final (camera-ready) submission you still will have to upload your main paper plus references separately from the appendix section, because otherwise you will be charged for the additional appendix pages by the IEEE.

Next, we would like to let everyone know that we initiated several improvements to the VGTC LaTeX template, which is now available to all authors. For example, we made some changes that make the template more compact for the listing of references (e.g., an automatic limit to the number of authors listed for each entry to avoid the template breaking for papers with many authors and to reduce the used space overall). In the text of the example paper we also updated the overall instructions for how to prepare papers for VGTC-sponsored events. We thus not only ask you to download the new version of the template for your submissions but also strongly recommend all authors to consult (or re-consult) these instructions for assistance on how to specify author details (Section 2), on how to create hyperlinks and cross references (Section 3), on how to embed figures most effectively (Section 4), on how to prepare your lists of references (Section 8), and much more. Of course, you are by no means required to use LaTeX to prepare your documents, but most of these guidelines apply as well if you use a different word processing software to prepare your submission, so we still recommend you consult this file even if you do not use LaTeX.

Specifically, a new section in the example paper we added is instructions on how to report about experimental results that involve human participants (Section 7). For these you, as authors, today are required to “include a statement in the article that the research was performed under the oversight of an institutional review board or equivalent local/regional body, including the official name of the IRB/ethics committee, or include an explanation as to why such a review was not conducted. For research involving human subjects, authors shall also report that consent from the human subjects in the research was obtained or explain why consent was not obtained,” as specified in Section 8.1.1.E of the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual. For more information please see our detailed instructions on this subject in the call-for-paper documents. Note: at submission time ideally you still include the statements, anonymizing them as needed.

We also would like to touch on the subject of AI-generated content in submitted papers. Our call for papers has clear instructions on how to report the use of AI tools for the creation of materials for the paper. Other conferences recently expressed concerns about AI-hallucinated content, in particular hallucinated references. We want to clarify that such a use of AI is not allowed. For this very reason we also expect that authors provide hyperlinked DOIs for all cited material that has such a digital object identifier—virtually all published papers and also books, preprints, theses, etc. These hyperlinked DOIs allow your reviewers to quickly check the material you are citing and to verify that they are legitimate (nonetheless, please ensure that all the DOIs indeed link to the pages they claim to refer to). Note that you do not necessarily need to use the potentially long original DOIs that the publishers provide, you can also use the shortDOI® service of the DOI foundation to save space in your documents. Either way, this inclusion of DOIs reduces the work that your reviewers have to do—in addition to the above-mentioned hyperlinking and other ways to make your paper reviewer-friendly. For further details on how to create a usable, correct, and consistent lists of references please see Section 8 of the template’s example paper.

Since the fall of 2025, we—the 2026 OPCs Melanie Tory, Alex Endert, and Tobias Isenberg, along with our OPC assistant Shani Spivak—have been working toward organizing the full paper submission and reviewing process. As a first point we would like to remind everyone that the old blog posts by the previous years’ OPCs and by the VGTC/VEC are still available for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. You may consult them for excellent guidance on issues such as the VIS area model, the role of keywords for authors and reviewers, how to make your paper reviewer-friendly, replication studies, handling conflicts and reviewing ethics, reviewing revised papers, and an analysis of the VIS 2025 review process as well as many more topics. In this first edition of the blog posts for VIS 2026, however, we would like to raise a few points that are new for this year.

First, in the submission process this year we are making a few changes, which we hope will improve the process overall. Specifically, we now allow the main paper upload to include the paper appendixes as well. That means that your paper still, like in previous years, can only have up to a maximum of 9 pages of main text plus you can fill the rest of your paper up to a maximum of 11 pages with references (with acknowledgements, additional material points, and figure credits being allowed on pages 10 and 11). In contrast to previous years, however, you no longer have to cut off your appendices and upload them as a separate file, they can be included in the main document, can be cross-linked to the main text, and do not count toward the 11-page limit. The intention of this change is that reviewers can take advantage of this integrated file and the cross-links between the main paper text and the appendices. The deadline for this upload does not change, it is still March 31. Also, this does not change your ability to upload further additional material files until April 7.

A second change we are making to the submission form is that we are introducing the option to suggest up to three external reviewers for a paper by providing their names, e-mail address, academic website, and reason for the suggestion. These suggested reviewers must not be in conflict with any of the authors, you as authors must not have contacted these reviewers about the submission, and they must not be members of this year’s IPC, area chairs (APCs) or overall paper charis (OPC). The secondary reviewer assigned to your paper may then consider these suggestions but is not required to pick from the list and can also assign a completely different person.

Finally, we maintain the program to involve and train younger members of our community in the reviewing process, but updated the name from “student reviewers” to “junior reviewers”. With this change we want to clarify that a junior reviewer does not necessarily have to be a PhD student but also includes anyone new to reviewing for IEEE VIS, whether they are Ph.D. students or seasoned professionals from other fields. For more details on this program please see the dedicated page on it.

In the coming weeks we will make a few additional blog posts on some dedicated issues, to help you prepare your papers for VIS in the best possible way.

Note: We added a small correction/clarification of the main paper and appendix download after the initial posting of this article.