How to write a paper - UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering
Transcript of How to write a paper - UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering
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How to write a paper
Toby WalshNational ICT Australia and UNSW, Sydney
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~tw
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How to write a good paper
Toby WalshNational ICT Australia and UNSW, Sydney
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~tw
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How to write a good enough paper
Toby WalshNational ICT Australia and UNSW, Sydney
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~tw
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Why me?
• I’m not sure
• Many other researchers who consistently get their papers published
• Peter van Beek, Pascal van Hentenryck, ...
• Often win best paper awards
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Why me?
• My papers get rejected too!
• “This should be sent to a journal”
• “Very good work, but I’m not sure why Alan Bundy hasn’t written this?”
• Anonymous review: “Clearly the author fails to understands Walsh’s previous work on this topic”
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1st Lesson
• Don’t lose heart
• Even if you do everything right, reviewing is imperfect
• Good papers will be rejected
• But try to learn from your knock-backs!
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Why you?
• Academic career
• Publish or perish
• Have an impact
• Communicate your results
• Many have not had the impact they deserve for being bad writers
• Writing is fun!
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Outline
• How to get your paper rejected
• There are many traps even experienced researchers make
• Myself very much included
• Hints about how to write a paper
• Writing is a craft not a science!
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How to be rejected
• Submit over-length
• Blind man: send in 7 pages even though the instructions clearly say 5
• Once they see quality of work, they’ll be pleased you sent in more material
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How to be rejected
• Submit over-length
• Diplomatic immunity: put extra 2 pages in appendix
• Appendices clearly don’t count
• Similarly, bibliography doesn’t count
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How to be rejected
• Submit over-length
• LaTeX hacker:
• change from 11 to 9 point font
• squeeze inter-line space
• ...
• No one will ever notice
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How to be rejected
• Submit late
• Deadlines are meant for everyone else
• Review schedules have plenty of slack
• Your paper is worth the wait!
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How to be rejected
• You don’t have room for space wasters like:
• Motivation, Background, Related work
• Why do review forms always have these on them anyway?
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How to be rejected
• Annoy reader/reviewer
• Proof is trivial, when it isn’t
• Prove the trivial
• Fail to cite their work
• Only cite yourself
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How to be rejected
• Annoy reader/reviewer
• Don’t bother to spell check
• What do computers know about spelling anyway?
• Use all the old cliches
• “There has been a lot of interest recently in global constraints.”
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How to be rejected
• Annoy reader/reviewer
• Be pompous, boring, ...
• This is science not literature guys, who said it should be fun?
• Be overly formal
• Theorems and formulas add weight
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How to be rejected
• Annoy reader/reviewer
• Make them really work
• After all, these are difficult concepts and it took you some time ...
• Ignore reviews
• Just keep sending paper in, eventually it will be accepted
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How to write a paper
• Hints about how to write
• Preparation
• Writing itself
• Ethics
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Preparation
• Read, read, read!
• To learn how to write, read a lot
• I spend over 20% of my time reading
• 1 day/week in library
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Read, Read, Read
• Related literature
• So you can cite it
• So you don’t re-invent wheels
• So you know what others think are important research questions
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Read, Read, Read
• Other conference/journal papers where you intend to publish
• So you learn the “house” style
• So you can place your work within the bigger picture
• So you learn how to ask good questions
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Read, Read, Read
• Any sort of literature
• Magazines, novels, biographies, ...
• Writing is a skill, learn from others
• I read approx one novel/week as a way of trying to learn how to write
• And I have the luxury of writing in my own language!
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Review, Review, Review
• Review as much as you can
• So you see good/bad writing
• So you see the newest results (but see ethics)
• So you ask yourself good questions
• What is the contribution here? What are the weaknesses? ...
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Write, Write, Write
• The best preparation to writing is to write
• Writing gets easier the more you do it
• Writing is easier if you’ve drafted much of what you already need
• Writing is the best way to organize your thoughts
• Writing is a good way to record what you have done
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Writing
• Work out the timetable
• Rushed papers frequently rejected
• Late papers are almost always rejected
• If you always write to deadlines, writing will seem more painful than it is
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Writing
• Work out the message
• You should be able to convey this in one sentence
• “We propose a new global constraint, provide a filtering algorithm and show it useful on some standard benchmarks”
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Writing
• Work out the message
• You should be able to convey this in one sentence
• “We identify an important class of symmetry, and show how to break it”
• Write to the message!
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Writing
• Distribute the work
• Play to your strengths
• If you have a native speaker, have them write intro/conclusion ...
• Write to length
• Brutally cut papers are frequently rejected
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Writing
• Structure paper before you write it
• I write template for paper with sections and subsection headings first
• Intro, Background, Theoretical results, Empirical results, Related work, Conclusions
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Writing
• Start where you are most happy
• Often write from the middle outwards
• Theoretical results, Experiments, ..., Conclusions, Introduction, Abstract
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Writing
• Rule of Three
• Say everything 3 times!
• Introduce idea (introduction)
• Develop idea (body of paper)
• Summarize result (conclusions)
• But don’t copy verbatim the same text!
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Title
• Make it meaningful and brief
• Don’t make a joke
• Remember someone reading reference needs to be able to work out likely contents
• Good: the TSP phase transition
• Bad: Easy Problems are sometimes Hard
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Abstract
• Executive summary
• Try for one sentence or so on:
• Motivation
• Method
• Key result
• Conclusions
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Introduction
• What is the problem?
• Why is it interesting?
• What are your contributions?
• What is the outline of what you will show?
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Introduction
• Lure the reader in a with a good first sentence
• Bad: There has been a lot of work recently on phase transition behaviour...
• Good: Global constraints are central to the success of constraint programming...
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Background
• Often need to set scene
• Define formalism
• Get reader up to speed
• Identify research problem
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Body of Paper
• Derive theoretical results
• Propose new algorithm
• Describe system engineered
• ...
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Results
• Bullet proof paper
• Theoretical results
• Experiments only provide a limited view
• Experimental results
• Theory doesn’t show if results are useful in practice
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Related work
• Has many purposes
• You give proper credit to prior work
• You are not re-inventing wheel
• You can compare what you do with what has been done before
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Conclusions
• Remind reader of what you have done
• Place work in wider context
• “What general lessons might be learnt from this study?”
• Flag all the exciting open research directions
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Acknowledgements
• Thank all who have helped you
• Provided code, data sets, ...
• Thank financial sponsors
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Writing
• Keep it simple!
• Active, not passive
• Present, not past or future
• Long words
• Short sentences
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Writing
• Avoid temptation to include every result you have
• Paper needs to be coherent
• Paper needs to be understandable
• Many papers are rejected for having too many results!
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Ethics of Writing
• Authorship
• Citation
• Submission
• Publication
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Authorship
• Who should be an author?
• Anyone who has made a significant contribution
• May not have written any text!
• Always err on the side of caution
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Authorship
• Who should be an author?
• Ask!
• You’ll be surprised how often people refuse
• You can be sure they’ll not work with you again if they feel they should be
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Authorship
• Should my advisor be an author?
• In first few years of thesis, probably yes
• ..
• Once you graduate, you should (be able to) write papers on your own
• Again, ask!
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Citation
• Cite all relevant work
• Reviews always ask about Related Work
• You’ll want them to cite you
• It’s central to the scientific method
• We stand on the shoulders of others
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Citation
• Do I cite myself for a blind review?
• Yes! You must credit all previous work
• Either cite [Author, 2004]
• Or write “As Walsh has shown previously [Walsh 2004] ...”
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Submission
• Can I submit to multiple conferences?
• What’s the deal with the disclaimer (”This paper is not under review ..”)?
• Can I submit to a journal immediately?
• No hard and fast rules
• My rule, once reviews are back and paper is effectively in press ...
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Publication
• Can I publish my conference paper as it is in a journal?
• Probably not, even though conference is not archival
• Most journals ask you to extend conference paper substantially
• Proofs, more experiments, ...
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Final words
• It takes time to learn how to write
• Don’t be put off if at first your have papers rejected
• All of us have papers rejected
• Spend time learning how to write
• It will be worth the investment