The Criteria for Acceptance Papers for the Journal of the ACM must be of high quality and fall within the scope of the journal .
Few papers excel in all three, but a substandard level in any is sufficient grounds for rejection.
This means that papers that may well be in first-rate journals may not be accepted to JACM . In any case, it is the authors' job to make it clear why the paper is important and of broad interest. To ensure that authors feel comfortable submitting despite these high standards, we aim for a two-step review process. In the first step, referees are given a month to scan the paper to decide if it meets these criteria, even assuming that all the results are correct as stated. If it seems that the paper might satisfy these criteria, referees are then asked to provide a more in-depth review in a further two months.