ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems

Type of Submissions

ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS) publishes high quality papers that address various aspects of recommender systems research, from algorithms, to the user experience, to questions of the impact and value of such systems. 

The journal accepts original research papers of different types, including: 

• Algorithmic papers that propose novel approaches to create, filter, and rank recommendations including but not limited to machine learning-based approaches. See further guidance for algorithmic papers here.
• Papers that investigate human-computer interaction aspects and the decision-making perspective of recommender systems.  
• Papers that describe system architectures and their implementations.  
• Papers that analyze the impact of recommender systems on their stakeholders such as users, organizations and society.  
• Papers that propose new ways of evaluating the effectiveness of recommender systems, e.g., in the form of new metrics, protocols and user studies.  

We expect that original research papers report the outcomes of a significant research effort, and that the presented content markedly exceeds what could be reported in a long conference paper. Usually, original research papers are expected to be between 20-35 pages in length. Submissions of extended conference papers are welcome as well, as described below, and also for such extended papers we expect at least 30% new technical content.

Besides, the journal welcomes the following additional types of contributions: 

• Survey papers that review subareas in the field of recommender systems and provide a significant synthesis. Authors of systematic reviews are encouraged to share online material that documents which papers were  considered in the survey and how they were categorized. 
• Industry reports, which for example provide case studies of successful deployments of recommender systems or outline important practical challenges when building or deploying recommender systems.
• Reproducibility papers that report on outcomes of replicability/reproducibility studies or that provide tools and libraries to support reproducibility, see also ACM’s terminology in that respect.
• Opinion/reflective papers that critically discuss aspects such as methodological issues or open research gaps. While such papers present the author's specific viewpoints, they should be backed by proper evidence and provide constructive ways forward.
• Registered reports: ACM TORS is exploring registered reports as a paper type. Please contact the Editors-in-Chief for guidance if you plan to submit a registered report. The potential benefits of registered reports, which enable a “results-blind” reviewing process, are discussed here. Find further information about registered reports at cos.io, osf.io and aspredicted.org.

In case of questions regarding paper types, length restrictions or other aspects of the submission and review process, please contact the Editors-in-Chief. 

Length of Submissions

Most published original research and survey articles are between 20 and 35 pages long in ACM’s “acmsmall” journal style. Since the overall goal is to publish high-quality, high-impact articles, even submissions with unusual lengths will be considered if their content is consistent with this goal. In particular, the length of a manuscript intended as the definitive publication on a major project or line of research may exceed the typical range of length just mentioned. On the other hand, if a manuscript presents a significant advance that can be described concisely, there is no point in adding unnecessary material just to reach a typical length.

Industry reports, reproducibility papers, and opinion/reflective papers are often shorter in length than original research and survey articles (e.g., 10 to 20 pages). These types of papers may for example not include detailed technical expositions of algorithms because these details are described already elsewhere (reproducibility papers) or because these papers do not focus on technical contributions (opinion/reflective papers). Again, however, there are no strict page limits and the paper length should be commensurate with the contribution of the work.

Cover Letter, Supplementary Material, and Reviewer Suggestions

Authors must submit a cover letter in which they declare that the submitted work is original, unpublished and not currently under review with another journal. Authors may also take the opportunity to provide other helpful information about their submission to the editors and reviewers. In case the submitted work builds and extends earlier own works, this should also be declared here. Cover letters will be visible for both editors and reviewers.

In addition to the cover letter, authors can submit additional supplementary material. Authors can decide if this material should be shared with reviewers or if it is only for editors. Suggestions for possible reviewers or information about potential conflicts of interests could be examples of information that authors may only want to share with the editors (but not with reviewers). Appendices which are not intended to be part of the paper, but will be later shared online (e.g., additional experimental results), could be an example of supplementary material that authors might want to share both with editors and reviewers. In case the submission is an extended version of an earlier conference paper, authors are encouraged to upload the conference paper for reviewers as well.

Authors are encouraged to indicate potential reviewers for their work within the submission system. This may help to accelerate the review process. It is however important that there is no conflict of interest between the suggested reviewers and the authors, see ACM’s Conflict-of-Interest Policy for details. Please keep in mind that reviewer suggestions must not be included in the cover letter, but should be entered in the corresponding form field in the electronic submission system.

Submitting Extended Versions of Own Previous Works

Submitting substantially extended versions of previously published conference or workshop papers is possible. We expect such papers to contain at least 30% new technical content (e.g., additional studies or experiments, further algorithmic improvements).

The 30% new technical content should consist of relevant technical enhancements that improve over the original paper and/or of experimental results (on additional datasets), with outcomes that complement the findings published in the original paper in important ways.

Authors are strongly encouraged to detail in the cover letter in which ways the new manuscript extends their own previous work. References to such previous work should also be made in the manuscript.

Reproducibility

ACM TORS is highly devoted to publishing reproducible research. Authors are therefore strongly encouraged to share all artifacts to help to make their research reproducible. For algorithmic papers, this should for example include all code and data that is needed to reproduce the experiments. The provided code should not only include the proposed algorithm, but also the code used to evaluate the baselines, code for data preprocessing and hyper-parameter tuning. For user studies, the raw and pre-processed data collected in the experiments should be shared, if possible along with the code used for data analysis. After acceptance, the material should be archived on a permanent public storage.

Submitting a Manuscript

When your manuscript is ready to be submitted, please go to Manuscript Central, create an account and password, log in and select “Transactions on Recommender Systems”, and proceed to the Author Center to submit a manuscript.

Corresponding Authors are being identified for all ACM publications. The corresponding author for a paper is the one person authorized by their co-authors to make eRights-related decisions about that paper and the corresponding author’s affiliation is now used to determine eligibility for participation in ACM OPEN. Please ensure this decision is made in advance of submission and your corresponding author has the information needed to make decisions regarding your published paper.

Research with Human Participants is subject to a new ACM Policy, www.acm.org/publications/policies/research-involving-human-participants-and-subjects that authors are responsible for both ethical conduct and for compliance with applicable laws and regulations; authors may be asked to provide documentation of compliance when appropriate.

When you write your paper with LaTeX, please make sure to not include line numbers in your submission, as line numbers will be added automatically. To suppress the (red) line numbers In the ACM LaTeX template, please change “\documentclass[manuscript,screen,review]{acmart}” to “\documentclass[manuscript,screen]{acmart}”.

Avoiding Inadvertent Violations of ACM's Plagiarism Policy

All manuscripts submitted to TORS are automatically processed by the “CrossCheck” plagiarism checker, which produces a detailed analysis of any textual overlap with previous publications. Experience has shown that even authors who presumably have no intention to plagiarize sometimes reproduce text in ways which are inconsistent with ACM’s policies on plagiarism. In the case of such errors, the manuscript must be returned to the authors so that the problems can be fixed. Authors are therefore advised to avoid the following mistakes in the first place:

Peer Review Process

Once a submission is received, TORS Editors-in-Chief will review it and send it to the pertinent journal section and its Associate Editors. They will read each article and determine if it should be returned without further review or advanced to full review. The opportunity for your paper to be accepted into the review process is dependent on its readability (as well as adherence to the journal scope), so you will want to make sure that your article has been written well. Such rejected articles (known as bench or desk rejects) cannot be reconsidered for full review unless invited by the Editors-in-Chief or Associate Editor for resubmission. An author can appeal such a rejection disposition to the Editors-in-Chief, who will make a one-time final decision. The philosophy of this journal is that the editorial board is actively engaged in review and will make a judgment rather than merely taking a vote among reviewers.

If advanced to full review, an Associate Editor will manage the submission. This Associate Editor will obtain full reviews by expert referees in the discipline or disciplines represented in the paper. Reviews are single-blind, meaning that the names of the reviewers are not made known to the authors. The standard number of reviews will be three and will span the disciplines that the paper covers. Our journal's goal is to complete reviews and provide a disposition decision in a timely manner. Should the article advance to revision, authors will be asked to revise within a reasonable time period, depending on the level of effort required. The revised paper, once submitted, will be reviewed.

After revision, the paper will be checked again for readability. The journal’s editorial policy is that readability is a measure of a paper’s accessibility and usefulness, particularly when the audience is international and interdisciplinary. When editing is extensive or when meaning is not clear, articles will be returned to the author for further revision.

For papers that make substantive contributions but that either fail to conform closely enough to the citation standard or have insufficient English composition, authors may be required to obtain professional pre-submission copyediting. These authors will be required to provide proof that they have revised their papers in accordance with the guidelines of the copyediting service.

Recommendations

Your submission will be returned with one of the following recommendations:

• Accept. The submission will appear in an upcoming issue of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems.
• Minor revisions. The current version of the manuscript requires minor revisions before further recommendations can be considered. The revised manuscript will be reviewed by the assigned associated editor and editors-in-chief for possible publication. TORS expects authors to submit revised manuscripts within 30 days for minor revisions.
• Major revisions. The current version of the manuscript requires major revisions before further recommendations can be considered. The revised manuscript will be reviewed by the original referees as well as the assigned associated editor and editors-in-chief for future publication. TORS expects authors to submit revised manuscripts within 90 days for major revisions from the date of the decision unless a request for an extension is granted by the editors-in-chief.
• Revise and resubmit. The authors are encouraged to submit a rewritten version of the manuscript, taking into account the critiques and suggestions of the reviewers and the associate editor. No specific conditions for acceptance of the rewritten submission are listed. If such a submission is made, it will be reviewed in its entirety. The set of reviewers will usually include some or all of the original reviewers.
• Reject. The manuscript is declined for publication in ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems as it fails to meet at least one of the standards for breadth, impact, novelty or correctness required for publication. 

Once Accepted

After your manuscript is accepted and ready to be published, you will prepare your accepted paper for publication as follows. 

Transmitting Accepted Papers

Once a manuscript is accepted, a final version must be submitted to the Editors-in-Chief for transmission to ACM for publication. This submission must be electronic using the ACM Manuscript Central web site. ACM provides for a wide variety of formats for such electronic submissions, including ASCII, LaTeX, Microsoft Word, PS and PDF. Please refer to ACM's Guidelines for Submitting Accepted Articles for details on final manuscript formatting and submission procedure. Note that all manuscripts are converted to PDF by ACM for input to its electronic publishing system and database.

Supplemental Online-only Material

Please provide a brief description of your supplementary online-only material (i.e., text and multimedia material) to be published in the Digital Library. A short “readme.txt” file will appear in the DL along with your supplementary material describing its content and whatever requirements there are for using it.

Copyright and Use Agreement

Authors retain liberal rights to material published by the ACM. ACM has introduced a new publishing license agreement, an updated copyright transfer agreement, and a new author-pays option which allows for perpetual open access through the ACM Digital Library. Further details can be found in at authors.acm.org.

Submittal of an algorithm for consideration for publication in TORS implies that unrestricted use of the algorithm within a computer is permissible.

If you have material owned by a third party, you must secure permission for its use before publication can proceed. If this is the case, please carefully read the third-party material guidelines and:

1. Obtain written permissions from the copyright holders.
2. Add the appropriate attributions to the figure captions in your paper (giving credit to the copyright holder).
3. Include the source of the third-party material in the references.

If you have questions concerning third-party material, please contact Stacey Schick at [email protected].

Author Name Changes

Author name changes in published papers are being made under ACM’s policy governing name changes, www.acm.org/publications/policies/author-name-changes. Such name changes are expected to be rare, and are only made based on the request of the author. To ensure consistent citations, all ACM authors will soon be asked for consent to allow ACM to update citations in their work if those citations undergo author name changes.

Availability of Published Articles

If your article is accepted for publication, it will be made available in the ACM Digital Library and subsequently in a printed journal issue.

A large proportion of potential readers have access to the ACM Digital Library via institutional or personal subscriptions. To ensure convenient access even for other readers, you can use ACM’s free Author-izer service to post an unrestricted link to the official ACM version of your published article from either your personal home page or an institutional repository.

ACM Computing Classification System (CCS)

If your paper has been accepted, please read the HOW TO CLASSIFY WORKS USING ACM'S COMPUTING CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM for instructions on how to classify your document using the CCS and insert the index terms into your LaTeX or Microsoft Word source file. Providing the proper indexing and retrieval information from the CCS provides the reader with quick content reference, facilitating the search for related literature, as well as searches for your work in ACM's Digital Library and on other online resources.

ORCID Requirements

ACM requires that all accepted journal authors register and provide ACM with valid ORCIDs prior to paper publication. Corresponding authors are responsible for collecting these ORCIDs from co-authors and for providing them to ACM as part of the ACM eRights selection process. For journals using the ScholarOne submission system, the submitting author will be required to provide their own ORCID upon submission. Authors are strongly encouraged, but not required, to include ORCIDs for all authors in their source files.  Please note: ACM only requires you to complete the initial ORCID registration process. However, ACM encourages you to take the additional step to claim ownership of all your published works via the ORCID site.

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission and supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities - ensuring that your work receives proper recognition. This requirement will also enable ACM to provide improvements to the normalization process of ACM Digital Library author profile data, aid in the detection of undeclared conflicts of interest and other publications-related misconduct in ACM Publications, assist with the implementation of ACM Open, and offer a host of other researcher benefits to ACM authors and the scientific community.

Before submission, the corresponding author should register for an ORCID.  Your co-authors should also create their individual ORCIDs at that time and add them to their accounts in the manuscript submission system. Otherwise, you will need to enter them manually into the ACM rights system upon paper acceptance and before publication in the ACM Digital Library. Simple instructions for complying with this mandate are provided inside the ACM eRights system.

ORCID information for all authors will appear on the article’s page in the ACM Digital Library. If ORCIDs are included in an article’s source files, they will also be linked in the published output.

The ACM ORCID FAQ should answer many of your questions.

ACM Policies

As a published ACM author, you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies.

ACM Policy on Authorship

The ACM Policy on Authorship and the associated list of Frequently Asked Questions cover the criteria for authorship and for submission, as well as acceptable and unacceptable authorship practices.

ACM Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy

The ACM Conflict of Interest (COI) Policy describes what a COI is, who is responsible for being aware of such conflicts, how to manage COIs, and how to report violations.

ACM Peer Review Policy

ACM recognizes that the quality of a refereed publication rests primarily on the impartial judgment of their volunteer reviewers. Expectations of reviewers and ACM, including key topics such as confidentiality, the use of large language models in the peer review process, and conflicts of interest, can be found in the ACM Peer Review Policy and its associated list of Frequently Asked Questions.

ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects

All authors conducting research involving human participants and subjects must meet appropriate ethical and legal standards guiding such research. These requirements are detailed in the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.

Templates

Manuscripts accepted for publication in any ACM publication must be formatted using the ACM authoring template. Submissions must also use the ACM authoring templates. ACM style files will closely approximate the final output, enabling authors to judge the page-length of their published articles.

ACM authoring templates and detailed instructions on formatting can be found at http://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. For both Word and Latex technical support, contact [email protected].

ACM Computing Classification System (CCS)

If your paper has been accepted, please read the HOW TO CLASSIFY WORKS USING ACM'S COMPUTING CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM for instructions on how to classify your document using the CCS and insert the index terms into your LaTeX or Microsoft Word source file. Providing the proper indexing and retrieval information from the CCS provides the reader with quick content reference, facilitating the search for related literature, as well as searches for your work in ACM's Digital Library and on other online resources.

Author Rights

ACM authors can manage their publication rights in either of the following ways:

• A license granting ACM non-exclusive permission to publish—allowing authors to self-manage all rights to their work by choosing to pay for perpetual open access from the ACM Digital Library.
• A publishing license agreement granting ACM exclusive publication rights—by granting ACM the right to serve as the exclusive publisher of a work and to manage ongoing rights and permissions associated with the work, including the right to defend it against improper use by third parties. (This license is roughly the equivalent of ACM’s traditional Copyright Transfer Agreement except that the author continues to hold copyright.)

As of January 2023, per decision of the ACM Publications Board, the traditional Copyright Transfer Agreement option is no longer available for ACM authors.  ACM will continue to defend all ACM-published works against improper use when allegations of publication-related misconduct are brought to light.  For more information please refer to this article in The Blue Diamond.

Additionally, ACM authors may post all versions of their work, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", to non-commercial repositories such as ArXiv. See the ACM Author Rights page for additional information.

Learn more, including about posting to pre-print servers and institutional repositories, by visiting the ACM Author Rights page.

Open Access

ACM has made a commitment to become a fully sustainable and Plan S compliant Open Access (OA) scholarly publisher within approximately five years. ACM offers a number of ways to achieve this goal, including Hybrid OA, Gold OA, and the ACM OPEN program.

Most ACM journals, with the following exceptions, are Hybrid OA.  ACM Gold OA journals are:

• ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO)
• ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI)
• ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
• ACM Transactions on Probabilistic Machine Learning (TOPML)
• ACM/IMS Journal on Data Science (JDS)
• Digital Government: Research & Practice (DGOV)
• Digital Threats: Research & Practice (DTRAP)
• Formal Aspects of Computing (FAC)
• Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL)
• Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering (PACMSE)

Click here to view the Article Processing Charges (APCs) to publish your article Open Access.

Additionally, all corresponding authors from an institution participating in ACM OPEN will have their research articles published OA at the time of publication at no cost to the authors.  Click here for a list of participating institutions. To ensure eligibility for the program, corresponding authors from participating institutions must use their institutional email address upon submission.

Language Services

ACM has partnered with International Science Editing (ISE) to provide language editing services to ACM authors. ISE offers a comprehensive range of services for authors including standard and premium English language editing, as well as illustration and translation services, and also has significant outreach in China. Editing is available for both Word and LaTeX files. As an ACM author, you will receive a generous discount on ISE editing services. To take advantage of this partnership, visit the Dedicated ACM Editing Service. (Editing services are at author expense and do not guarantee publication of a manuscript.)

Author-izer Service

Once your manuscript is published, this service allows you to generate and post a link on your home page or institutional repository to your published article. This link will let any visitors to your personal bibliography pages download the definitive version of the articles for free from the ACM DL. These downloads will be recorded as part of your DL usage statistics. A detailed description of the service and instructions for its use may be found at the ACM Author-Izer Service page.

LaTeX Collaborative Authoring Tool on Overleaf Platform

ACM has partnered with https://www.overleaf.com/, a free cloud-based, authoring tool, to provide an ACM LaTeX authoring template. Authors can easily invite colleagues to collaborate on their document. Among other features, the platform automatically compiles the document while an author writes, so the author can see what the finished file will look like in real time. Further information can be found at https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. The ACM LaTeX template on Overleaf platform is available to all ACM authors https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/acm-official#.WOuOk2e1taQ.

Kudos Article Sharing Platform

Kudos is a free service that you can use to promote your work more effectively. After your paper has been accepted and uploaded to the ACM Digital Library, you'll receive an invitation from Kudos to create an account and add a plain-language description. The Kudos “Shareable PDF” allows you to generate a PDF to upload to websites, such as your homepage, institutional repository, preprint services, and social media. This PDF contains a link to the full-text version of your article in the ACM DL, adding to download and citation counts.

Author Gateway

Please be sure to visit the ACM Author Portal for additional important author information.

Contact Us

For further assistance and questions regarding the journal editorial review process and paper assignment to an issue, contact the journal administrator ([email protected]).