Author Guidelines for InfoQ Articles

InfoQ is always on the lookout for quality articles and encourages practitioners and domain experts to submit feature-length articles. Our readers value articles that are timely, educational and practical. Articles should be timely because InfoQ tracks important and significant trends within our respective communities. Educational means that articles should teach our readers something non-trivial. Practical means that readers should take away processes and practices that can be applied in their daily work.

Community and Audience

InfoQ is a practitioner-driven community of team leads and architects, and articles are written by our peers. Our readers are senior technical influencers who are voracious learners, and they often influence innovation within their organizations. While software development may constitute a portion of their overall responsibilities, our readers often must wear multiple hats on their teams. Here are some of their primary day-to-day activities:

• Managing a development team
• Overseeing development testing/QA
• Helping dev teams adopt TDD, BDD and good refactoring practices
• Project management: Ensuring projects are delivered on time and within scope
• Overseeing integration of cross-departmental and B2B systems
• Overseeing operations and ensuring system up-time
• Application design & architecture
• Requirements management: Gathering customer requirements and translating these into technical specifications

Personas and Topics

InfoQ addresses the entire enterprise software development space from top-level architecture and design to development and through to deployment and delivery. InfoQ thinks of each of these in terms of personas. Each persona represents the role one serves in their professional work. InfoQ's personas are Enterprise Architecture, Architecture & Design, Development, Process & Practices, and Operations & Infrastructure.

Within our personas are the topics that each is interested in. A list of trending topics by persona can be found on the InfoQ home page. Simply hover over a persona to see the correlating topics. So you'll find Java, .Net, Ruby and other language topics under our development persona. Under Process and Practices you'll find Agile Techniques, methodologies, Lean/Kanban, articles on leadership, and so on.

Length

Feature-length articles range between 1,500 words and 4,000 words, but average between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Below are guidelines for writing InfoQ-quality articles along with the requirements for proposing and submitting articles.

Writing Style

Write your article in a conversational voice, as if you were explaining your concepts to a colleague or peer. Assume your readers have extensive knowledge and they do not need introductory concepts explained. Do not fluff your articles with excessive descriptions, and be as concise as possible. Use bullet points to quickly summarize key points. Your readers will appreciate it.

Proposals

Submitting a proposal is straightforward. If you have already written your article, simply submit the draft and we will evaluate it. If you have not already written your first draft, create a one-paragraph abstract describing your idea and include a brief outline that highlights the points you plan to cover. The outline and abstract need not be formal, but they should convey enough information that we can evaluate your idea. Please include a proposed title, the timeframe in which you plan to submit your completed draft and a brief (one or two sentence) biography. Also be sure to include complete contact information with your proposal.

Once we receive your proposal, we'll review it and provide feedback on its suitability for InfoQ's audience. Often we will make suggestions that will improve your proposal. Upon acceptance of your proposal, we will pair you with an editor and a technical reviewer who will perform a deeper review on the substance and provide you with iterative feedback to prepare it for publishing.

Here are some key reference points that could be very helpful:

• All articles are accepted/rejected based on an article and not an abstract. If you would like feedback regarding the suitability of a topic, by all means send us the outline/abstract.
• Do your best to have specific take-aways from the article. A reader of your article should be able to walk away with a set of actions to perform, a new theory to think about, or a thought-provoking question to answer.
• Your article should be no less than 1,500 words and no more than 4,000 words. Typical articles range from 2,000 to 3,000 words.
• If you are new to writing articles, we suggest that you keep the article small and concise.
• Do not fluff your articles. Be as concise as possible. Assume your readers are experienced in their field and know fundamental concepts. Your readers will appreciate it.

You will find a list of articles published on our site here: InfoQ articles

Send your proposal or rough draft and a member of our editorial staff will work with you to prepare the article for publication and set a publication date.

Submission and Formatting Guidelines

InfoQ articles are formatted for online reading according to our in-house style guides. Therefore it is important not to send pre-formatted documents with complex formatting. Articles can be submitted in plain text or Word format. Our editors will remove formatting basic rules (such as font styles) from the text and format it according to our style guide.

Your document may contain tables, lists and other elements. Tables will be converted to HTML tables. Numbered or bulleted lists will be converted to HTML ordered or unordered lists.

Images may be embedded in a Word document or submitted separately as a JPEG. Images submitted in other formats (such as Tiff) will be converted to JPEG. Diagrams created in a vector graphics program should likewise be output as an image. If you have any questions, please contact the editor working with you.