Week6-Sectionsofapaper.ppt

Research Paper
Instructor: Mr. Fiaz Majeed

What is Research Paper?
 “Research Paper” refers to a particular genre of
academic writing, in which the writer’s own
interpretation, evaluation, or argument on a specific
issue is given prominence
 A research paper involves surveying a field of
knowledge in order to find the best possible
information in that field
 Such information is then utilized to present a
competent argument on a topic
 Hence a research paper requires a presentation of your
own thinking backed up by others’ ideas and
information

What is Research Paper?
 In short, a research paper is:
 focused on a specific issue/problem
 a presentation of facts that are based upon
extensive reading and extraction of information
from several sources
 original in selection of literature, evaluation,
expression and conclusion

What is in a Research Paper?
 When writing a research paper, you are
expected to
 identify and briefly describe the works you have
consulted
 analyze and interpret relevant literature
 frame the literature as evidence to support your
argument
 make conclusions

Types of Research Papers
 Journal papers
 Often many pages (20 - 30)
 Surveys or deeper paper
 Conference and workshop papers
 Full papers (around 10 pages)
 Short papers (around 5 pages)
 Poster sessions
 Technical reports
 Published at a university/company, not reviewed
 Magazines
 e.g. IEEE Computer

A Skeleton Paper
 Title, author(s) and
affiliations
 [Contents, list of tables, list
of figures]
 Abstract
 [Index terms/Topic
keywords]
 Introduction
o Background information
o Problem definition
o Summary of
contributions
 Related work
 Method
 Results
 Summary and conclusions
 [Acknowledgements]
 References
 Appendix
 [Index]

The Title
 Must be informative, clear, and meaningful
 Don’t use symbols in titles
 All nouns are capitalized in the title
 The title is centered on the page
 Your names and date appear below the title
 -Phrases to avoid: Investigation, Study, Novel,
Facile etc.
 - Avoid Acronyms that are known only to specialized
community

The Abstract
 Summarizes problem, result, and uses
 Between 100–250 words
 Avoid references and acronyms
 First couple of sentences should focus on what the
study is about
 Include major findings in a style that a general
readership can read and understand (i.e., avoid
detailed experimental procedures and data.)
 Keep it short and effective

Index Terms
 Used to classify the paper
 ACM have a special thesaurus for topic keywords
 Examples from the multimedia ﬁeld
Communications/Networking/VOD – Servers – Interactive TV
– WWW/Hypermedia – Operating Systems – End Workstation
Hardware – Compression/Decompression/Analysis –
Applications – Information Retrieval – Databases –
Programming Paradigms – Media Integration/Synchronization
– Collaboration Environments – Logical/Conceptual
Manipulation of Video

Introduction
 Explains the background/signiﬁcance of the paper
 The opening paragraph should be the best paragraph
 The opening sentence should be the best sentence
 Bad: An important method for internal sorting is quicksort
 Good: Quicksort is an important method for internal sorting,
because . . .
 Start the section with a general background of the topic
 Add 2-3 paragraphs that discuss previous work
 Point out issues that are being addressed in the present
work
 Ended by a summary of the organization of the paper

Background Information
 A short introduction to the area
 Example: “A Brief Review of LR-Parsing”
 Cite references for more details

Problem Definition
 A concise statement of the problem you are solving
 Why it is useful to solve the problem?
 If your problem is “develop an X algorithm capable
of handling very large Y problems in reasonable
time”
 Explain “large problems” and “reasonable time”
 Then show that other algorithms fail
 Justify when a solution to this problem is useful

Summary of Contributions
 What was investigated/built and what you found out
 Don’t make forward references to technical section
 You’re writing a scientiﬁc paper, so
 Opinions must be backed up by arguments or references,
otherwise they should be removed
 Facts must be veriﬁable by the reader
 Be humble—don’t use superlatives
 Bad: This is a great algorithm
 Good: We believe this algorithm is useful for the following
reasons

Related Work
 Identify all relevant related work (with references)
even if it’s old or doesn’t solve exactly the same
problem
 References must be locatable so don’t use “personal
communication”
 Compare your work with previous work. You must
convince the reader that your work is original
 Examples and measurements are great for this
 Clearly separate your results from their results
 Don’t be condescending about other people’s work

Method
 Divide this section into Materials & Methods,
Characterization,
 How you did it
 Tests, procedures, methods, experiments,
processes, equipment, data structures,
algorithms, etc.
 Proofs for algorithms
 Termination
 Correctness (soundness, completeness)

Results
 Describe the results in detail and include a healthy, detailed
discussion
 The order of figures should follow the discussion themes and
not the sequence they were conducted
 Discuss how your data compare or contrast with previous
results
 Include schemes, photographs to enhance the scope of
discussion
 Avoid Excessive presentation of data/results without any
discussion
 Avoid Citing every argument with a published work

Summary and Conclusion
 Interpretation of your work: pros & cons
 Limitations of your solution
 Suggestions for “Future Work”
 Rejected alternatives
 Experiences
 Don’t just re-word the abstract
 Statements with “Investigated” or “Studied”
are not conclusions!

Acknowledgements
 Remember to thank the funding agency and
Colleagues/scientists/technicians who might
have provided assistance
 Typically mention grants

References
 Make sure all references are referenced
 Some common reference formats are
 Turing stated the following theorem [12] . . .
 . . . as shown by Ullman [Ull87].
 What goes in the reference depends on the type of publication
 Books: author, title, publisher, ISBN, year
 Journal: author, title, journal, volume, month, pages
 Report: author, title, source, year
On the next page you see the reference list of an article by Debray
[DW88], a technical report and a proceeding paper by Warren [War83,
War86], and a book by Lloyd [Llo84].

References
[DW88] Saumya K. Debray and David S. Warren.
Automatic Mode Inference for Logic Programs. The
Journal of Logic Programming, 5:207–229, 1988.
[Llo84] J.W. Lloyd. Foundations of Logic Programming.
Springer-Verlag, 1984.
[War83] D.H.D. Warren. An Abstract Prolog Instruction
Set. Technical Report Tech. Note 309, SRI
International, Menlo Park, CA, 1983.
[War86] D.H.D. Warren. Optimizing Tail Recursion in
Prolog. In Logic Programming and its Applications,
pages 77–90. Ablex Publishing, N.J., 1986.

HOW TO WRITE AN EFFECTIVE
RESEARCH PAPER
 Getting ready with data
 First draft
 Submission
 Revision and galley proof

Getting ready with data
 Gather all important data, analyses, plots and tables
 Organize results so that they follow a logical sequence (this
may or may not be in the order of experiments conducted)
 Consolidate data plots and create figures for the manuscript
 (Limit the number of total figures (6-8 is usually a good
number).
 Include additional data, multimedia in the Supporting
Information.)
 Discuss the data with your advisor and note down important
points

First draft
 Identify two or three important findings
emerging from the experiments. Make them
the central theme of the article
 Note good and bad writing styles in the
literature. Some are simple and easy to follow,
some are just too complex
 Note the readership of the journal that you are
considering to publish your work. Prepare
figures, schemes and tables in a professional
manner

Selecting a journal
 Each journal specializes in a specific area of research. Hence
its readership varies. A proper choice of journal can make a
larger impact of your research.
 Get to know the focus and readership of the journal that you
are considering. - general vs. specialized area journal
 Select 2 or 3 journals in the chosen area with relatively high
impact factors. Discuss with your advisor and decide on the
journal
 Find out the journal’s submission criteria and format
 Tip: Does your references cite journals in the appropriate
area?

What to do if a paper gets
rejected……
 Do not get discouraged. Read editorial comments and discuss with
advisor/students/collaborators. Find out how you can make this study
stronger and acceptable for publication
 Do not just turn around and submit the paper to another journal
 Read carefully the comments and find ways to improve the scientific
quality of the papers
 Carry out additional experiments and improve the quality of
scientific discussions. (Journals often look for papers with
quantitative and mechanistic information that represent new physical
insights )
 Rejected papers can be resubmitted if and only the concerns of the
reviewers are adequately addressed and new results are included
 If you have questions, please feel free to contact the editorial office.

Ten characteristics of an
incredibly dull paper
1. Avoid Focus
2. Avoid originality and personality
3. Make the article really really long
4. Do not indicate any potential implications
5. Leave out illustrations (…too much effort to draw a sensible
drawing)
6. Omit necessary steps of reasoning
7. Use abbreviations and technical terms that only specialists in
the field can understand
8. Make it sound too serious with no significant discussion
9. Focus only on statistics
10.Support every statement with a reference

Week6-Sectionsofapaper.ppt

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