Vis Supplementary

VIS Supplementary

Use this when assembling IEEE VIS supplemental material. The governing rule is strict: the paper must be judgeable from the reviewed pages alone. But VIS is unusual among conferences in how much its reviewers rely on the supplemental video and code to understand an interactive contribution — so the split is not "body carries everything, supplement is optional" but "body carries the decision, supplement makes the interaction and reproduction legible."

What goes where

If a reviewer would need to open the archive to know whether to accept, the paper is mis-partitioned — move that evidence into the body. But an interactive system that cannot be understood without seeing it move should ship a video; a static screenshot alone under-sells it.

The supplemental video (a VIS-specific expectation)

For technique and system papers, the video is often how reviewers judge whether an interaction actually works. Treat it as a first-class deliverable:

[Length]     keep to the customary short length; lead with the contribution, not a long intro
[Content]    show the real interaction on real data, at usable speed; caption what to watch
[Quality]    legible resolution, readable text, no stutter; a required codec/container
[Anonymity]  if double-blind, strip affiliation slates, voice-over names, visible usernames,
             desktop clutter, and watermarked project URLs
[Deadline]   VIS 2026 gives a one-week window AFTER the paper deadline for supplemental material —
             use it to finish and anonymize the video, not to keep editing the paper

The page-budget discipline

VIS's VGTC/TVCG budget is 9 pages of content + up to 2 pages of references and acknowledgements. It counts figures and tables — and visualization papers are figure-heavy. Consequences:

• Keep the evaluation that decides acceptance and the encoding rationale in the body.
• Push full parameter tables, additional conditions, extra stimuli, and long apparatus details to the supplemental archive with explicit forward references.
• Do not use the supplement to smuggle in a result that would not fit — an argument that only closes with material outside the reviewed pages reads as unreviewable.
• Budget figure space deliberately: one well-designed teaser and the key result figures earn their space; a wall of thumbnails does not.

Double-blind supplemental rules (when you opt in)

[No identity]   no authors, affiliations, acknowledgements, grants, cluster paths, lab names, or
                repo owners anywhere in the archive, README, or video
[Anonymized links] the open-materials link points at an anonymizing host, not a personal repo/OSF
[Clean archive]  no .git history, .DS_Store, credentials, caches, or huge irrelevant files
[Playable]       verify the video plays in a standard player and the archive unzips and builds
                from a one-minute README on a fresh machine

Vignette: splitting a system + study paper

A paper contributing an interactive analytics system plus a user study: the body keeps the design rationale, the system's key views, the headline study results with effect sizes, and the threats; the supplement holds the video demonstrating the interaction, the system's source with a build script, the study stimuli and anonymized responses, and the analysis notebook. Nothing decision-critical lives only in the archive, but the interaction is only fully legible via the video.

Output format

[Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready
[Partition check] anything decision-critical outside the body? <none / move: what>
[Video] present and legible? shows real interaction? anonymized (if double-blind)? yes/no
[Page budget] body within 9 pages? refs within 2? figures earning their space? yes/no
[Anonymity] archive + video clean of identity + metadata? passed/issues
[Body dependency] <what a reviewer can decide without opening the archive>

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → VIS-Skills/skills/vis-supplementary/SKILL.md