Guidelines for presenters at EVU conferences

Submitting a paper

Authors who would like to present should submit a short abstract (limited to 400 words) to the conference committee (conference@evuonline.org). This abstract should be in English, whereby early submitters can expect support in the translation from other languages. From these suggestions, the scientific board will choose the papers presented at the conference and ask these authors to supply a full paper. In general, there are no oral-only presentations. You may however submit a paper without willing to present it at the conference. Presentations should be designed to last about 25 minutes, leaving 5 minutes for the discussion. Exceptions to that rule need a special agreement with the conference committee. Papers will be presented in the conference proceedings as well as PDFs on the conference CD-ROM. After the conference, the papers will be made available on the EVU website for download by EVU members.

Timeline

The exact timeline may vary from year to year as the conference date shifts somewhat, but this is the general timeline:

Abstract submission

Abstracts have to be submitted until the end of January. You will get an acknowledgement of receipt within a few days after sending your e-mail. Until April the conference committee will inform you whether your paper has been accepted and will provide you with a template paper (as a PDF) and a document template, either for Microsoft Word or LaTeX.

Submission of the paper

The full paper has to be submitted until the mid of June. The preferred language for the papers is (British) English, with German and French as possible alternatives. We would like to encourage authors to supply papers in their native language (if any of the three) and English.

Starting with the mid of June, the papers will be layouted in LaTeX and you will receive a PDF proof in the time span between its filing and the 31st of July. This proof has to be confirmed by the author within two weeks after reception, otherwise we will consider it as valid. Authors should indicate whether they are also willing to give the translated versions a check. The conference proceedings will at least be translated into German.

In regard to the simultaneous translation, we would also like to have PDFs of the presentations until end of August.

Additional material for the conference CD

Please indicate whether we can provide the presentation as a PDF on the conference CD-ROM or whether we should treat it confidential. Any additional material for the conference CD-ROM (like photographs and videos) should be provided until the end of August.

Presenters which do not follow the timeline will be substituted by reserve presenters.

Basic requirements for the papers

Although the conference proceedings will be laid out in LaTeX, papers can be supplied in other word processor formats, especially in Microsoft Word format. The final papers basically have a two-column layout. We appreciate if the authors provide pre-formatted papers. As the final layout will be done in LaTeX, this formatting does not need to be perfect.

Please refrain from capitalising words, especially from capitalising them completely. Authors who are not native speakers should use British English (e.g. manoeuvre, metre, tyre, kerb).

Abstract

Each paper has to begin with an abstract consisting of 100 – 300 words. This abstract should point out the problem, the basic idea for it's solution and the basic results. This abstract will later turn into the short description of the paper on the Internet. It should basically tell the possible reader why he should download (and possibly pay for) it.

The main text

Papers should not exceed 8 pages of pure text, which roughly equates to about 5000 English words in the final layout. The shorter your paper, the more likely it will be translated into other languages (if the translation is not supplied by yourself). In the end, each paper will have an even page count, enforced by the final layout.

Figures

Figures can either be (roughly) column- or text-wide, i.e. have about 81 mm or 170 mm (= 2 × 81 + 8 mm) in width. In the final layout, figures will be placed as floats, i. e. they will be placed not at a specific location but in the "corners" of the pages with only a loose, rubber-band like connection to the text. Each figure therefore needs a caption denoting its basic content. This purely descriptive caption text should not be repeated in the main text.

Each figure must be referred to in order to establish a link to it in the text. This link should be as short as possible, e. g. simply placing the words ", figure xy" at the end of a sentence.

Authors must supply each figure as a single document, i.e.

• Photographs as JPEGs with a minimum horizontal resolution of 810 pixels if column-wide or 1760 pixels if text-wide
• If three photographs are combined horizontally to a text-wide figure with three sub-captions, the minimum resolution of the single photograph is 540 pixel (i. e: 3 × 54 + 2 × 4 mmm = 170 mm).
• Scans of sketch-like illustrations (e.g. accident sketches) as PNGs or TIFFs with a minimum resolution of 1000 pixels (if column-wide) or 2100 pixels (if text-wide)
• vector drawings like Excel diagrams, CAD drawings, etc. must be provided as PDFs. The same holds for figures which combine pixel images (so-called bitmaps) with vectors, photographs with lines or arrows drawn upon them.

As an alternative, you may supply figures in their native format, e.g. Excel diagrams as an Excel worksheet.

Tables

With regard to printing quality, tables should be provided in an editable format, e.g. Excel or Word, not as an image (e.g. a screenshot). Very complicated tables will be placed in the final layout as they are, i.e. as a PDF representation.

References and Citations

Citations should be placed at the end of the text in either alphabetic order or in the order as they appear in the text. The correct citation of a journal article should look like:

Meyer, S.; Hugemann, W.; Weber, M.
Zur Belastung der Halswirbelsäule bei Kleinkollisionen
Verkehrsunfall und Fahrzeugtechnik 32 (1994), pp. 18 - 25 (# 1) + pp. 132 -138 (# 7/8).

(All) authors are listed with their surname, the initial letter of the first name separated by a comma, authors separated by a semicolon. The title should be written without using any abbreviations. The reference to the publishing journal should comprise:

• the full name of the journal = Verkehrsunfall und Fahrzeugtechnik
• the volume number = 32
• the publishing year in parentheses = (1994)
• the pages 'from page – to page' = pp. 18 – 25
• the number of the issue in parentheses = (# 1)

For journals, the citation usually refers to the volume (32), not to the year. Redundant information is always given in parentheses. As the year can usually be calculated from the volume, it is therefore given in parenthesis. The same holds for the pages: as these are generally consecutive in one volume, the number of the issue is redundant information and is therefore given in parentheses. Please mind to mention the last page in your citation. For SAE papers, the number suffices, e.g.:

Bundorf, R.,T.; Leffert, R.,L.
The cornering compliance concept for description of vehicle directional control properties
SAE paper 760713

Please refrain from capitalising words in the title. The correct citation of a book would look like:

Mitschke, M.; Wallentowitz, H.
Dynamik der Kraftfahrzeuge
Springer, Berlin, 2006 (4th edition)

The last line should mention the publishing house, including the exact location, if there is more than one (like for Springer), the publishing year and possibly the edition. The latter is again redundant information.

The references in the text will be given in square brackets in the final layout, by establishing a logical link between the reference in the text and the full citation at the end of the text. Authors can do the following to support this logical linkage:

• establish logical links in LaTeX by use of the \cite macro
• link to a text mark or an end note in the Word document
• assign each citation with an unequivocal name (such as Lambourn_1998) and refer to this

within the main text, i.e. [Lambourn_1998]

Contact information

Contact information for all authors will be provided at the end of the paper, e.g.:

Iwan Parry BSc MIHT MITAI
Group manager
Incident Investigation and Reconstruction
iparry@trl.co.uk
Paul Fidler BSc
Consultant
pfidler@trl.co.uk
TRL Limited
Crowthorne House
Nine Mile Ride
Wokingham
Berkshire
RG40 3GA
United Kingdom

This information should comprise:

• full name of the authors with academic titles and position
• postal address
• e-mail addresses for all authors

Keywords

You may supply keywords of free choice

British Spelling

Based on the correction of numerous papers we would like to provide the following hints on the British spelling in the papers:

• it is "analysed" (British spelling) rather than "analyzed" (American spelling)
• it is "tyre" (British spelling) rather than "tire" (American spelling)
• it is "colour" (British spelling) rather than "color" (American spelling)
• combinations of nouns are mostly written as separate words, thus it is "crash test" rather than "crashtest"
• the same holds for combinations of a abbreviation and a noun, thus it is "EDR values" rather than "EDR-values"
• combinations of other word types with nouns are mostly written with a hyphen, thus it is "pre-crash data" rather than "pre crash data"
• plurals of abbreviations are followed by an s without an apostroph, thus it is "EDRs" rather than "EDR's"
• do not omit the definite article before nouns (as common in other European languages), thus it is "reading the speed and the position" rather than "reading speed and position"
• a motorcycle is controlled by a "rider" rather than by a "driver"
• a vehicle does have a simple "speed" rather than a sophisticated "velocity"
• The British hyphenation rules differ significantly from the American. While Americans are rather freely in regard to where a word can be hypenated, Brits are very conservative and allow only a few hyphenations. As a consequence, most word processors – especially MS Word – due a bad job in regard to British automatic spelling. In short: Authors should turn off the automatic spelling and leave it to the proofreaders!

LaTeX

Detailed information on the LaTeX Layout can be found at The LaTeX environment for the EVU conference proceedings.

Basic requirements for the presentation

The oral presentations can be given in either English, German or French. Nevertheless, all slides of your presentation must be in English or bilingual (English / German or English / French). If you feel unable to provide English slides, the committee will assist you in the translation.

While presenting, you should be aware of the simultaneous translation, which will slow things down. The organisation will ensure that presenters do not change slides while the translation is still going on. This will limit speakers to about one slide per minute on average and inhibit catching up time by just speaking faster.

Please design your presentation in a way that it could possibly be presented on another computer, which (alternatively) means

• save it in a somewhat older format version of PowerPoint
• make it a ready-to-run (EXE) version
• make it a PDF presentation (especially those of you who use the LaTeX Beamer package)

In regard to external material this means

• use only relative links to external files
• use only common video codecs, especially open source codecs such as Xvid

If you make use of special software while giving your presentation (e.g. special video players), please let us know in advance.