Manuscript submission is MANDATORY to present at the conference. Acceptance of a paper for NAT is a commitment to submit your manuscript ON TIME and to attend the conference and present. Dozens of abstracts were eliminated to include yours in program and proceedings. If you are not committed to submitting a final manuscript on time, and attending the conference, please contact us immediately and we will remove you from the program and proceedings to make room for another presentation. We appreciate your dedication to the industry in this capacity. 

NAT reviews manuscripts.  Draft manuscripts for review are due no later than October 31, 2021.  They can be submitted by using the button below.

Reviewers will get comments to authors no later than December 2, 2021.

Final, complete manuscripts are due no later than December 15, 2021 again at the blue button below

Your paper should be submitted as a Word document (.doc, .docx). You must submit the figures as part of the main document.

NAT Manuscript Criteria

1. Does the paper add unique value to the international tunneling and underground space community, i.e., to your knowledge, this or similar material has not been published?
2. Does the paper present new concepts and information?
3. Is the technical content presented and supported well in the paper, e.g., equations, tables, figures, rationale, conclusions?
4. Is the paper well written – organized, easy to understand, written with correct English grammar and paragraph/sentence structure?

Copyright Submission

Every author shown on the final paper must submit a copyright submission. This includes authors and co-authors. This is a mandatory requirement to include an author’s name. Copyright submission will be submitted online during the Final Manuscript Submission process.

Manuscript Submission Resources

• Manuscript Layout Template (Editable Word Template)
• SME Style Guide

Guidelines for Submitting Your Manuscript

1. Be certain to use the Guidelines and layout template. These are provided in advance to help you prepare your manuscript.
2. Be certain all appropriate and necessary permission have been received to publish and present the manuscript.
3. Extended abstracts and PowerPoint slides are not acceptable for the conference proceedings publication and should not be submitted.
4. Manuscripts that are not submitted in an acceptable format may be returned to the author to be corrected or removed from the final publication.
5. Please keep your paper to 5,000 words or fewer.
6. Page size should be 8.5" x 11" with 1" margins.
7. For all text, use a common font such as Times New Roman, Arial and Symbol.
8. All regular text, including author name, author affiliation, bulleted, numbered, table text, references, etc.: 11 pt, regular
9. Title and Heading Level 1: bold, all caps, flush left
10. Subtitle and Heading Level 2: bold, initial caps, flush left
11. Heading Level 3: bold, sentence style, end with a period. Heading level 3 should run right into the paragraph text.
12. Table or Figure Caption: 11 pt, bold
13. Table Column Heading: 11 pt, bold
14. Extract Text (quotations): 10 pt, regular, left and right indent of 0.38”
15. Footnote Text: 10 pt, regular
16. Page Number in Footer: 10 pt, regular

Editorial Tips

Here are a few of the most commonly misunderstood or misused points of style. Please consult the SME Style Guide for more details or for anything that isn’t covered here.

1. In publishing, only one space is used between sentences and after colons (not the two spaces we learned in typing class).
2. Use capitalization and italics judiciously. It is not always necessary to capitalize or italicize for emphasis or for the name of company departments, pieces of equipment, titles, offices, acronyms or terminology.
3. In general, most compound words with prefixes such as non, ex, re, pre, are not hyphenated. But use the hyphen when the second word is a proper noun (e.g., post-Vietnam).
4. Full dates are written like this in running text: January 1, 2002. Months and years may be abbreviated in tables to save space. When the date doesn’t include the day, there is no comma between the month and the year: January 2002.
5. Always place periods and commas within quotation marks. Place colons and semicolons outside quotation marks.
6. In a series consisting of three or more elements, separate each element by a comma (often called the “series comma”). If commas are used within an element, use semicolons.
7. Commonly used foreign words do not have to be printed in italics: et al., in vitro, and in situ.
8. Numbers under 10 are spelled out EXCEPT for expressions of time, measurement and money. A single number more than 10 is always given as a number unless it is the first word in a sentence.
9. When using numbers of one thousand or more, commas should be used between every group of three digits. Example: 4,000. Exceptions are addresses and years.
10. Avoid mentioning specific commercial product names. If at all possible, use generic equivalents. Trademark symbols are not required (e.g. ®, ™).
11. Avoid e.g. and i.e. in running text. These abbreviations are OK in parentheses or in tables and figures. Use periods in both. Use commas after them.

Reviewer comments will be Returned to Submitting Authors no later than December 2, 2021.

Final Manuscripts are due December 15, 2021

Download Manuscript Guidelines

Prepare your manuscript the right way with these manuscript preparation guidelines.

Submit Your Manuscript

For questions regarding manuscripts, please contact SME Authors Support at authors@smenet.org