What Are Guidelines?

Guidelines are documented recommendations that establish accepted practices, formats, and ethical standards for a domain of professional activity. In engineering and technical publishing, they serve as normative or informative references that help authors, standards developers, and organizations produce work that meets agreed-upon quality, consistency, and integrity requirements. Unlike mandatory standards, guidelines often carry advisory rather than binding authority, though compliance is strongly encouraged within professional communities and is frequently required by journals, conferences, and standards bodies.

The role of guidelines in technical fields extends well beyond simple formatting rules. They encode the professional consensus on issues such as authorship attribution, conflict-of-interest disclosure, data integrity, and peer review conduct. They also provide practical instruction on citation style, manuscript structure, and technical terminology, ensuring that published work is reproducible, traceable, and accessible across international readership.

IEEE Publishing Guidelines

IEEE maintains a detailed set of publishing guidelines that govern the preparation and submission of manuscripts to its journals, transactions, and conference proceedings. The IEEE Editorial Style Manual for Authors specifies formatting conventions for equations, references, figures, and tables, and designates The Chicago Manual of Style and Merriam-Webster Dictionary as supplementary authorities. The IEEE Author Center's publishing ethics guidelines address originality requirements, prohibitions against duplicate submission, and policies on retraction and correction. Peer review policies define blinded review procedures, reviewer conflict-of-interest handling, and timelines for editorial decisions.

For standards development activities, the IEEE Standards Association publishes separate guidelines that govern how working group participants may communicate publicly about draft standards and how voting procedures are conducted. These documents ensure that the process leading from a draft proposal to a ratified IEEE standard remains transparent and technically rigorous.

ISO Documentation Standards

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) administers its own publishing framework that applies to all documents developed through its technical committees. The ISO/IEC/IEEE 15289:2019 standard defines the required content of life-cycle information items for systems and software engineering projects, establishing a common vocabulary and structure for technical documentation across national boundaries. ISO's house style guidelines specify how documents are to be structured, how terms are to be defined, and how normative requirements are to be distinguished from informative material using precise linguistic conventions such as "shall," "should," and "may." Submission requirements to ISO Central Secretariat include format rules for graphics, tables, and cross-references, and all final documents go through an XML-based production workflow that enables output in PDF, HTML, and ePub formats.

Relationship Between Guidelines and Standards

Guidelines and formal standards occupy different positions in the normative hierarchy of technical publishing. A standard such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 15289 carries binding status once adopted by a project or organization; a guideline document typically informs best practice without prescribing a specific technical solution. In practice, many IEEE and ISO guidelines eventually feed into formal standards revisions, serving as trial documents where the technical community can develop consensus before a requirement becomes mandatory. Conversely, standards bodies often publish companion guidelines that explain the intent behind normative language and provide implementation examples, helping practitioners apply standards correctly.

Applications

Guidelines have applications across a range of technical and professional domains, including:

• Journal and conference manuscript preparation in electrical engineering and computer science
• Development of IEEE standards by working groups and technical committees
• Systems and software engineering documentation for lifecycle management
• Regulatory compliance documentation in aerospace and medical device industries
• Curriculum and accreditation requirements in engineering education