Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • All authors of the manuscript have read and agreed to its content and are accountable for all aspects of the accuracy and integrity of the manuscript.
  • The authors have read and followed the instructions in the Author Guidelines (https://tinyurl.com/3xv6pctp), including the policies related to artifact sharing and use of generative AI tools.
  • Your manuscript is not currently under consideration by another journal (duplicate submissions will be desk rejected) and has not been accepted or published in another conference or journal (publication on preprint servers such as arXiv is allowed).
  • Your manuscript follows the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines and enforced by the SBC Reviews LaTeX template (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/template-sbc-reviews-2025/qvbgfsxjsksb), without local changes to the .cls file. XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX compilers must be used.
  • Your submission adheres to the single-blind review model, and the authors' names and citations to their previous works should not be hidden.
  • The authors are aware they must provide the source files in LaTeX format if the manuscript is accepted. The editorial team will not accept sources in any other format (e.g., Word, etc).
  • The authors acknowledge that, if the submitted manuscript is accepted, and to support the equitable review process of other papers, at least one author may volunteer and commit to serving as a reviewer. Volunteer reviewers are expected to hold a Ph.D. or equivalent degree in CS or a closely related area. By agreeing to this, each paper must inform the volunteer’s full name, area of expertise, institutional email, and highest academic degree.

Author Guidelines

SBC Computing Reviews — or simply SBC Reviews — is a fully open-access journal published by the Brazilian Computing Society (SBC), dedicated to disseminating comprehensive and rigorous literature reviews across a wide range of Computing research topics. 

SBC Reviews appraises submissions of high-quality literature surveys that summarize and organize recent research results in a novel way to integrate and add understanding to works in the field, address progress and/or critical assessments relevant to Computing subfields. 

The journal also welcomes various types of systematic literature reviews (SLR) frequently employed in academic research, including multivocal literature reviews (MLR), meta-analyses, and scoping reviews (ScR)/systematic mapping studies (SMS).  Updates to existing systematic literature reviews that maintain their currency and relevance are also encouraged. Systematic literature reviews are rigorous, comprehensive reviews aimed at answering a specific, focused research question by critically appraising and synthesizing all relevant original research studies. Systematic literature reviews include the following review types, among others (Ralph and Baltes 2022):

  • Meta-analyses are a type of SLR that analyzes a set of primary quantitative studies with the same independent and dependent variables to statistically aggregate the results of the primary studies into a global effect size estimate..
  • Scoping reviews (SCR) address broader, exploratory research questions to map the extent, range, and nature of research on a particular topic. Scoping reviews help determine whether an SLR is necessary. Systematic mapping studies (SMS) are scoping reviews that provide an overview of research used in software engineering.
  • Multivocal literature reviews (MLR) are a type of SLR that incorporates both formal, peer-reviewed literature (like journal articles and conference papers) and grey literature. Grey literature includes technical reports, blog posts, and conference presentations, which may not be formally published or peer-reviewed. 

SBC Reviews does not accept papers primarily devoted to presenting new technical results. Papers for SBC Reviews must fall within the journal's scope, be of high quality, be relevant to significant areas of research or practice in the Computing field, and follow recognized guidelines.

For extended versions of systematic literature reviews previously published as conference papers, the manuscript must be a non-trivial extension of the version published in the conference, and ensure that the extended review contains at least 30% of new material that conceptually extends the original work. Authors must include in their submission a cover letter explaining the manuscript’s suitability for publication, detailing the extension of the original work, and all areas of new or revised content.

Use the “Comments for the Editor” field to provide the following information:

  • An explanation of why your manuscript should be published in SBC Reviews.
  • Issues related to journal policies.
  • Special issue name (if applicable).
  • The title, venue, and DOI of the previously published work (for extended papers).

Manuscripts must be written in English or Portuguese. Submitted manuscripts must not exceed 35 pages, including references, when formatted using the journal template. When justified, additional material may be considered or published in an electronic supplement.

How to submit

Authors must register and submit their articles using the journal's online submission system. Submissions must be in PDF format. A LaTeX template for submissions is available on Overleaf. The template offers a convenient way for authors to prepare their manuscripts. Authors can access the SBC Reviews template here. Alternatively, they may download the LaTeX template from GitHub. Once a manuscript is accepted, the final source files must be submitted electronically through the journal's online submission system. 

Authors should read our detailed [Author Guidelines] for information about SBC Reviews formatting standards.

Peer-Review Process

SBC Reviews implements a single-blind peer-review process. Reviewers know the authors' identities, and authors receive anonymous reviewer reports. The editors-in-chief conduct a preliminary analysis of the submitted article to determine whether it is a literature review, fits the journal's scope, and satisfies the guidelines outlined on the authors' instructions page. If the initial analysis is favorable, the submitted paper is forwarded to an associate editor to conduct the evaluation phase with the reviewers. Otherwise, it will be desk-rejected. 

A submitted manuscript is typically reviewed by two to three reviewers, who evaluate it based on solid and standard criteria for literature reviews, check whether it duplicates already published work, check whether the manuscript is sufficiently clear for publication, and generate a review report. If a conditional acceptance is based on major or minor revisions, the paper will undergo further revision rounds before a final decision is made. If accepted, the paper moves to the editing stage, where authors must submit the editable version in LaTeX and update the submission metadata, and then it undergoes an editorial process to be published.

Quality Assessment

Authors should read our detailed [Author Guidelines] for information about SBC Reviews quality criteria and recommended methods.

Research Artifacts

The sharing of research artifacts and materials is increasingly encouraged and often required by leading journals and systematic review standards and guidelines. Sharing these materials enhances transparency, reproducibility, and trust in research findings and facilitates future updates and meta-analyses. Recommended research artifacts may include the review protocol, data extraction forms and extracted data files, information about the included studies, code, and other relevant materials.

Authors who can share their artifacts should deposit them in machine-readable formats via public repositories, such as Zenodo, Figshare, or institutional repositories. These should have persistent identifiers (e.g., DOIs) and appropriate licenses. This information must be explicit in the paper's “Availability of Research Artifacts” declaration section.

Authors should read our detailed [Author Guidelines] for information about required research artifacts and materials.

Policy on the Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Authors submitting manuscripts to SBC Reviews have to acknowledge and conform to the SBC Code of Conduct for Authors. This document includes the following requirements related to the use of generative AI tools. This information must be explicit in the paper's “Use of Artificial Intelligence” declaration section. 

  • "The use of generative AI tools and technologies for content generation, in writing and/or reviewing the content of articles, must be explicitly declared in the work."
  • "These tools cannot be listed as authors of an article."
  • “The use of such tools does not exempt the authors from responsibility for all their content.”

Copyright Notice

Authors publishing in SBC Reviews retain the copyright to their articles and authorize SBC to publish them under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC BY 4.0). Thus, the authors or third parties can reproduce or distribute, in part or in whole, content extracted from the published articles, verbatim, adapted, or remixed, provided that the appropriate credits are attributed to the original authors and the original publication. 

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.