Guidance & templates

Guidance for submissions

For all submissions, to ensure you are not rejected for simple reasons, please ensure your paper is focused on transdisciplinary engineering. Typically this means that your paper should have a number of features that indicate it is clearly suitable for TE2024:

• The words (and/or their variants) 'transdisciplinary' and 'engineering' is visible in the title, abstract and keywords of the submission

• The description of your project is clearly a piece of analysis or research of some sort, that involves or is about engineers or engineering in a central way

• The paper is clearly not a standard engineering analysis/research, as it might be that:

  • It involves practitioners in some way - businesses, policy or community actors in the project

  • It involves non-engineering experts from other academic disciplines, especially but not exclusively, social scientists

  • It has a section reflecting on how your work affects the normal or standard ways in which engineering is done, and how it might change or challenge that - or indeed how it needs to change if it is to take account of your findings.

• We expect most papers to be written by those working as engineers - either academically or in industry - but ideally these papers will also have co-authors across academia and industry and beyond engineering, including the social sciences. 

• We encourage social scientists with an interest in engineering practice and the governance of engineering to submit - the sort of papers that would or could go to journals like Engineering Studies or interdisciplinary topical journals like Design Studies or Energy Research and Social Science. 

• We encourage engineers working in non-typical settings such as charities or government to submit a paper or consider attending to be part of the community

Length and format

The full paper must be no longer than 10 pages in length. This includes everything from the title through to the references. Due to the style of the template (see right column for the template) this means that the text you draft for the paper will be around 5000 words depending on the number of charts or figures. You should therefore aim to focus on what would would be about 50% the equivalent coverage for a journal paper here, and have fewer figures and references. Further, with potentially more focus on the engineering element than you might otherwise write for the full journal article, this will make it more appropriate for TE2024, and easier to redraft into a full paper either for a TE-related special issue or for another journal of your choice.

Full paper submission guidance

As you prepare your full paper for submission to TE2024 you need to be aware that the submissoin will be reviewed by 2 independent referees in a fully blind process. This means you should submit you manuscript without author name or affiliations on them. On the right a Dummy paper template provides you with the right format for most papers. Please use this to submit your papers.

For more details and example of what counts as a good submission for TE2024 we encourage you to read and reflect on the TE definition paper hosted at the ISTE Website or take a look at some key papers from previous conferences that seek to explore and define TE in some way. These papers give some deeper definition, and at the end a good example paper.

• Concepts of transdisciplinary engineering: a transdisciplinary landscape - Lattanzio et al, 2021

• Transdisciplinary systems engineering: implications, challenges and research agenda - Wognum et al, 2019

• Integration across knowledge boundaries during new product introduction - Wlazlak et al, 2021