IEEE Security & Privacy Author Information

Please ensure your submission aligns with the magazine’s topics and scope. Submitted articles should be understandable to a broad audience of people interested in security and privacy. The writing should be down to earth, practical, and original. Authors should not assume that the audience will have specialized experience in a particular subfield. All accepted articles will be professionally edited and formatted.

Articles should provide insights about a subject by considering and evaluating different approaches based on certain criteria: for instance, an article can implement various schemes used for smart contracts and compare and evaluate them. S&P is interested in the general added value rather than a very specific and scientific article. An example would be a review of existing literature that provides recommendations for tackling the problems of the existing work, not worked-out proposals of solving that problem. Surveys and tutorials are in scope, particularly where there are new technologies or approaches that haven’t yet had broad exposure.

As this is not a research journal, please do not submit research papers, particularly those that address a narrow technical area and those that lack results of experimental validation or deployment of new methods or technologies. Authors of such works are advised to submit to conferences and journals with the appropriate scope. IEEE Transactions on Reliability or IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, for example, might provide appropriate venues for such submissions.

If there is any question of whether a paper fits these criteria or would otherwise be of interest to S&P, we recommend contacting the editor in chief (EIC).

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Peer-reviewed articles should run between 4,900 to 7,200 words, including all main body, abstract, keyword, bibliography, biography, and table text. The word count should include 250 words for each table and figure. There should be no more than 15 references. The abstract word limit is 50 words.

Before submitting, please read our author guidelines. When you are ready to submit, please go to the IEEE Author Portal.

Department Articles

Department articles should contain 2,200 to 3,700 words. They are not peer-reviewed. Department articles can be “point of view” or “position” articles, for example, a valid criticism of a current security policy issue.

Prospective department writers should contact the EIC with a prospective article. The EIC can help identify to which S&P department it best aligns. The department editor(s) will work with the author(s) to finalize the article for publication.

Open Access

This magazine is a hybrid publication, allowing either traditional manuscript submission or author-paid Open Access (OA) manuscript submission. Read about OA submissions here.