vis-topic-selection
Use when deciding whether a project belongs at IEEE VIS or should be routed to EuroVis, PacificVis, CHI, a graphics venue, or the IEEE TVCG journal track, and when choosing among the six VIS areas (Theoretical & Empirical, Applications, Systems & Rendering, Representations & Interaction, Data Transformations, Analytics & Decisions) by contribution type and evidence maturity.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill vis-topic-selection --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# VIS Topic Selection Decide the venue and the area before drafting. IEEE VIS is the flagship of the visualization community, and since 2021 it is a **single unified conference** whose full papers are **IEEE TVCG journal articles** across **six areas**. Two routing questions matter: **is this a visualization paper at all** (versus HCI, graphics, or ML), and **which of the six areas** is its primary home. A technically strong paper whose real lesson is about a model, a rendering primitive, or an interaction unrelated to seeing data is respected and then rejected as out of scope. ## Is it a visualization paper? VIS rewards contributions about **how people visually represent, interact with, and reason about data**. The test: if you removed the *visual-representation-and-task* core, is there still a paper? If the contribution is a machine-learning model whose visualization is incidental, or a rendering technique with no data-analysis task, or an interaction study with no visual-encoding question, a sibling venue fits better. If the heart is the encoding, the perception, the analytic workflow, or the visualization system, it is a VIS paper. ## Choosing among the six areas (the primary-a
- Is it a visualization paper?
- Choosing among the six areas (the primary-area decision)
- Sibling-venue routing table
- Contribution shapes VIS rewards
- The remove-the-visualization and re-label tests
- Evidence maturity, without the ladder cliché
- Decision procedure
What does the vis-topic-selection skill do?
Use when deciding whether a project belongs at IEEE VIS or should be routed to EuroVis, PacificVis, CHI, a graphics venue, or the IEEE TVCG journal track, and when choosing among the six VIS areas (Theoretical & Empirical, Applications, Systems & Rendering, Representations & Interaction, Data Transformations, Analytics & Decisions) by contribution type and evidence maturity.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill vis-topic-selection --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.