IMC 2014 lectures, posters and proceedings

Proceedings are a crucial key to justify the efforts invested in a conference. Timely publication of the papers is essential. We insist not to postpone your paper. Delivery of papers before the conference is very much appreciated.

Presenting a good lecture or poster requires to be well prepared. The best way to prepare your IMC presentation is in first order to summarize your information in the form of a written paper. Based on this paper a power point presentation can be derived for a lecture in function of the attributed lecture time. Always leave a margin of 2-3 minutes for questions or comments from the audiance and pay attention to the time duration of your lecture. Don't try to fit 20 minutes in a talk of 15 minutes. Having prepared an article as paper contribution to the IMC Proceedings, you'll be better prepared for your lecture or poster and you help the IMC Proceedings getting out in time.

We recommend to prepare your paper in Word, an example how your article should look like can be downloaded here.

Instructions for all authors

Everyone who gives a talk or presents a poster at the IMC is supposed to write a contribution on his/her talk or poster for the IMC Proceedings. If you cannot provide a paper because it is already being published elsewhere, you should at least provide an abstract of at least a few paragraphs, accompanied by the relevant references.

Please mind the following general guidelines in writing your contribution.

  1. There is no formal page limit, but contributions should be concise. Most contributions fit within 4 pages (as printed in the proceedings’ style), few exceed 6 pages. If you think you need more pages and can justify this, please contact The 2014 IMC Proceedings editors.
  2. Convey content. Your contribution must have a purpose, and the text of your contribution should make that clear to the reader. Just a title and a collection of pictures with captions, for example, is not acceptable.
  3. Writing style should be formal and scientific. Avoid mixing in your own emotions in your writing, prefer written language over spoken language, and avoid abbreviations such as “don’t” or “can’t” but write “do not” and “cannot.” Scientific writing furthermore requires that statements not substantiated in your paper are supported by properly cited references. These general principles also apply to papers that are more descriptive by nature.
  4. Use simple language. The larger part of the IMC audience does not have English as native language. Make your paper accessible to as many interested persons as possible by avoiding long sentences, difficult grammatical constructions, or fancy words. Also, avoid needless words. If you can convey a thought in five words rather than ten, go for the former.

It is always a good idea to browse through previous IMC Proceedings to get a better feel of what is expected of you as an author. You can find preview articles of the IMC 2012 Proceedings at http://www.imo.net/imc2012/proceedings. Also, much of what is said in
http://www.imo.net/docs/writingforwgn.pdf about writing for the IMO Journal WGN is also applicable to the IMC Proceedings. Finally, the sample article, even though primarily intended for LaTeX users, is of interest to all, in particular for matters of style and layout.
(download the sample article (PDF)).

Your article should contain the following elements.

1. Title

The title of your contribution is preferably identical to the title of your talk/poster, although this is not a requirement. Notwithstanding, the contribution must of course deal with what you presented in your talk or poster. A good title is neither too short nor too long and should be telling. From the title, readers must get a representative idea of what your contribution is about. “Fancy” or “clever” titles must be avoided. Do not capitalize each word in your title (in other words, write your title as if it were a normal sentence in a text).

2. Authors

Immediately under the title comes the list of all contributing authors. Each author must be identified with his/her full first name and last name (middle names and/or initials are optional). Please be careful not to misspell the names of your co-authors, especially if they contain characters which have accents on them.

3. Affiliations/addresses and email addresses

The affiliations/addresses and email addresses follow immediately under the list of authors. Use superscript numbers to link each author to his/her correct affiliation and/or address. Under the affiliation or address, mention the email addresses of all authors with that affiliation, in the same order as in the author list.
Notice that, for at least one author, an affiliation or address and an email address is required.

4. Abstract

The last part of the contribution’s header is the abstract. It contains typically five to fifteen lines explaining (1) what the paper is about, (2) which results or type of results are described in it, and (3) what is generally concluded from them. Unless explicitly building on previous work, avoid citing references in your abstract. Ideally, your abstract should be able to stand alone. Mind that the content of scientific publications is often described by giving title, authors, and abstract of each contribution.

5. Introduction

The actual paper typically starts with an introduction. This introduction must introduce the subject of your contribution by providing the necessary context. You should aim at writing this introduction in such a way that a serious meteor amateur, irrespective of his specialization in meteor astronomy, can understand it. (The later sections can of course be more technical). The context you describe here may contain some historical background, give a description of the problem in general terms, and compare with other relevant work in the literature. In all cases, the introduction should clearly state the aims of the contribution.

6. Technical/detailed sections

The Introduction is the first in a series of numbered sections.
After the Introduction, some more technical or detailed sections will follow. Section headings must be representative for the content of that section, but should also be short. Preferably a section heading should fit on one line, but certainly not require more than two lines.
You may also use subsections, provided the organization of the paper benefits from it. As a general rule of thumb, avoid sections or subsections that are unreasonably short. Subsections are best avoided in very short contributions, and “sub-subsections” are to be avoided altogether. Remember, the purpose of sections and subsections is to organize the paper so that its structure becomes apparent to the reader, and not to hide its structure from the reader!
The rules for capitalization of the title also apply to section and subsection headers.

7. Concluding section(s)

In one or more concluding sections (Discussion, Conclusions, Future work, …), the authors should reflect on the meaning of their results, provide a short summary of what they have accomplished, and optionally discuss ongoing and future work.

8. Acknowledgements

This is an optional unnumbered section in which the authors can thank persons or institutions who provided help in either writing the paper or doing the work described in the paper. If this work is part of a project sponsored by a third party, and you must acknowledge this support, this is the place to do so!

9. References

The references are also listed in the very last section, which is also unnumbered. References should be relevant to the text of the paper, meaning that each and every reference must be cited in the paper! Even if you want to add some references providing further background information to the interested reader, they should be cited, for example in the Introduction, where you might say “The interested reader is referred to … (followed by the references concerned). Uncited references will be removed in the editing process!
References are cited by the author’s last name (if there is only one), both authors’ last names (if there are two), or first author’s last name followed by “et al.” In each case, the year of publication follows. Distinct references for the same claim are separated by semicolons. This is a (fictitious) example of how to do it:
Many authors have shown this (Asher, 2011; 2012; Arlt and Rendtel, 2009; Barentsen et al., 2010).
An alternative way to cite references is the following:
This has been shown by Asher (2011; 2012), Arlt and Rendtel (2009), and Barentsen et al. (2010).
Depending on whether the authors are part of your sentence or not, you choose the latter or the former form.
References should conform the following format:

In the bibliography, references must be ordered alphabetically on the full list of authors. If two references share exactly the same list of authors, they should be ordered according to the year of publication. References with the same list of authors and the same year of publication should be distinguished by adding a lowercase letter to the year of publication, e.g., 2012a, 2012b, etc. This letter must, of course, also be added in citations of this reference.

10. Figures

As must be the case for references, figures should be relevant to the paper you are writing. Hence, each and every figure must be referred to in your text! Figures are numbered consecutively (Figure 1, 2, 3, and so on). Always refer to a figure by its number! Never use “the figure above” or “the figure below” as the precise location of the figure in print may change due to the editing.
Your figures may be in full color, which is now for the on-line version, but mind that the Proceedings are printed in black-and-white, and that there is invariably a loss of quality in the printing process. Therefore, make sure your figures are of good resolution, not too dark and of sufficient contrast. Be aware that very fine details will get lost. In particular, pay attention to the readability of text and numbers, in particular along the axes of a graph. Mind in particular that many screenshots we receive do not meet these minimal quality requirements!
We can deal with most common formats for figures, although jpeg and png are preferred.
Each figure should have a figure caption beneath it explaining what the figure represents. Make sure to explain the symbols used in the figure.

11. Tables

Just like figures, tables must be relevant: each and every table must be referred to in your text! Tables are numbered consecutively (Table 1, 2, 3, and so on). Always refer to a table by its number! Never use “the table above” or “the table below” as the precise location of the table in print may change due to the editing.
The sample article gives a very general idea how a table looks like in the style of the IMC Proceedings. Notice that no vertical lines are used to separate columns! For more complex tables, we refer to the preview contributions of the 2012 IMC Proceedings.
Each table should have a caption, which should appear above the actual table. Make sure all symbols used in the table heading are explained in the caption, unless they are standard, such as “ZHR”.

Instructions for LaTex users

We prefer contributions prepared in WORD. If you prefer LaTeX, however, we suggest you also provide a PDF from which we can convert into Word.

While it is ok for us that you include your figures in your Word document to have a single document containing everything (reducing the risk that a figure is overlooked, for example), we ask you to supply us the original figures also separately. Screenshots from a PDF produce poor graphics, if necessary we will ask for your original figures anyway.