Special Sections: Inquiries about Special Sections devoted to a single topic which is both timely & relevant to the reliability discipline, may also be addressed to the Managing Editor. 

Copyright: It is the policy of the IEEE to: 

• own the copyright to the technical contributions it publishes on behalf of the interests of the IEEE, its authors, and their employers, 
• facilitate the appropriate reuse of this material by others. 

Writing: To be considered, all papers must be written clearly, logically, and without unnecessary material. We prefer all papers be written in first person to the extent possible. Nouns should come early in sentences, and verbs should follow right behind. Papers should also be free of spelling, and serious grammar errors. To be clear, authors should strive to write logically organized papers which convey the main value of their work best. This usually means excluding unnecessary material from the paper, and focusing the readers' attention on its value. 

Manuscripts: Authors must submit 1 legible copy of all written & illustrative material in electronic *.pdf (preferred) or *.ps (second option) form, and one original electronic copy in either TeX, LaTeX, or MSWord; please do NOT submit more than 1 copy. Manuscripts must be double-spaced, with one page-wide column. Do NOT submit in camera-ready format. If the text is composed/ typeset, the line-spacing must be 3 lines/inch and the type-size 12 points. Paper size must be A4 or 8.5 × 11 inches (21.5 × 28 cm); format as necessary. All non cameraready material (abstract, biographies, footnotes, references, figure captions, etc) must be double-spaced (3 lines/inch or 24-point line spacing). This enables the editors to annotate the manuscript. 

Each manuscript must include the following three things (in the indicated order) at the front of the paper: 

1. Key Words: See a recent issue of Transactions for the content & style of this section. (Reader Aids have been discontinued.)
2. 
    
3. Summary & Conclusions: The Summary portion answers the question, "What did you accomplish?" and is based on information in the manuscript. It is not the place to introduce new thoughts, data, or analysis. The Conclusions explain why the results are useful and why the work is of interest to the reliability community. Equations and reference numbers may not appear here. The length must not exceed 1 manuscript page.
4. 
    
5. Introduction: The Introduction puts the paper into perspective for the reader. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? What methods did you use? What is the sequence of the presentation? Equations should be avoided in the Introduction. An Acronym list and a Notation list should be included if acronyms and math-notation are used in the manuscript. 

References: The list of references must be numbered consecutively and should include (in the following order) author name(s), title, journal (or book & publisher), volume, year & month of publication, inclusive page numbers. 

Illustrations: Line drawings are preferable to photographs. All line drawings (e.g., graphs, charts, block diagrams, cutaways) must be black and white, clear, free of extraneous marks, and be ready for scanning/conversion to an electronic file, if needed. Only the main coordinate lines ought to show in graphs; the original graph paper usually has too many lines on it. Use lettering large enough to stand reduction, in most cases to a 3.50 inch (89 mm) column width. Show the figure numbers on each illustration. All drawings & photographs must meet the size requirements in Manuscripts. 
As guides to producing good figures, tables, and other illustrations, see the books by Edward R. Tufte, beginning with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 

Author(s): Provide each authors name in order of contribution, and their IEEE affiliation. Then reference their location and complete contact information. Use an Acknowledgement to credit the people who helped with the research but did not write the paper. 

Enclose a current biography in narrative format; each biography must be less than 1/2 manuscript page and all together must fit on 1 manuscript page. Provide the exact/complete mailing address (including title, if desired) in the exact format for copying directly onto an envelope. See the Managing Editor's address above for an example. ALWAYS list the country. Internet (e-mail) addresses are published if available. 

Refereeing: The names of referees are not made known to authors. If the authors' names are not on the manuscript, they must be provided on a separate sheet. 

Accepting Paper and Electronic File: After a paper is accepted for publication (by both the Associate Editor and the Managing Editor), the Managing Editor requests an electronic file, preferably in the IEEE format. We prefer TeX or LaTeX. MSWord is the next choice, in .doc or .rtf format. Receiving such a file is essential for reasonable processing of the paper. 

Voluntary Page Charges: You may request the 'IEEE Voluntary Page-Charges & Reprint-Order Form' from the Managing Editor, or by downloading from the IEEE website. 

General: Material not accepted for publication will be returned upon request. Previous issues show style of referring to equations & references, as well as general style. Look at the remainder of this Information for Readers & Authors for some notation & nomenclature standards. 

IEEE-HQ uses a common standard, SGML, for the publication format of its Transactions to provide widely usable electronic files for these Transactions.

Some words are used in specialized, narrowly defined statistical sense—not the meaning ordinarily assumed by engineers. In order to avoid confusion (for the authors & readers), such words must be preceded by s-; examples are s-normal (Gaussian), s-bias, s-significance, s-independent, and s-confidence. At times, an author wishes to give a specialized, narrow definition to other words in order to make the paper more compact & exact. Such terms are italicized, or converted to proper nouns or acronyms. There must be a one-to-one correspondence between a concept and its name—you are writing a technical paper, not a novel. 

Algebra
 

		implies an identity or definition
=		implies an equality which is derivable from other equalities or definitions
		implies approximately-equal; the closeness ought to be stated if it is critical
r.h.s		right-hand side
l.h.s		left-hand side
gilb (·)		greatest integer lower bound; floor(·), , [·]-
liub (·)		least integer upper bound; ceiling(·), , [·]+
lA(x)

Logic Notation
 

		implies an identity or definition
		proper subset of
		intersection
		union
|		given (given that); used only with operators like Pr{·}, E[·]; the condition is on the r.h.s; conditional events, per se, are not definable

Operator Notation

Statistical notation is not standardized, and thus can be confusing to engineers. The following notation & abbreviations are used throughout the Transactions. These are not functions in the engineering sense, but are more like operators. Common synonyms are given in parentheses. The centered dot in the braces shows where the variable goes. The base-notation (e.g., Cdf, pdf) is often used as an abbreviation in text material (to be sure that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a concept and its name). 
 

Miscellaneous Abbreviations
 

Redundancy Notation
 

Common Functions
 

		Gamma function
		: Beta function
		: binomial coefficient

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