These criteria have been adapted from the review criteria developed by a small subcommittee of the SciPy 2016 organizing committee. The goal is to help guide authors and reviewers alike. Suggestions and amendments to these review criteria are enthusiastically welcomed via discussion or pull request.
- Prose should be written in English.
- Prose should clearly communicate the narrative.
- The written style should convey information that furthers the knowledge or research of the reader.
- Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the SciPy community, highly domain-specific jargon should be avoided or explained where possible.
- The technical content should be scientifically sound.
- Computational content should, likewise, be verified.
- The work should describe the development or use of python software for approaching a problem of relevance to the SciPy community (as defined by, for instance, the domains covered by the SciPy conference.
- Software descriptions should be accompanied by references to or examples of representative source code.
- Source code essential to the conclusions of the paper should be made available to the reader.
- Data sources should be identified (e.g., with citation to a persistent DOI).
- Analysis should be accompanied by a workflow description sufficient to reproduce the results.
- All mentioned software should be formally cited wherever possible.
- Acronyms should be spelled out upon first mention.
- License conditions on images and figures must be respected (Creative Commons, etc.).
- Mathematical and other symbols should be defined.
- Definitions should include consistent units where appropriate.
- The compiled version should be no longer than 15 pages, including figures.
- All figures and tables should have captions.
- Figure text should be of a readable size.
- Code snippets should be formatted to fit inside a single column without overflow.
- If not in Python, the language in the code snippet should be mentioned.
- Code snippets should follow a common style guide. PEP8 is preferred.