Write good papers

So, you want to write a good paper? The most amusing reference is E. Robert Schulman, How to Write a Scientific Paper, Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 2, No. 5, pg. 8.

For a more serious methodology, follow the following steps.

1. Picking a topic, an idea

My friend Peter Turney has a key piece of advice: be ambitious. Imagine each new paper you write as a lasting reference for your peers. Do not merely aim to get your papers accepted. Aim to have a lasting impact on your field.

We should learn something new. You have to challenge your readers and yourself!

I know of three strategies to write an ambitious paper:

• Pick a new problem nobody has worked upon. Define the problem and be the first to propose a solution. This is the best way to get highly cited and become famous.
• Try to explain something significant nobody has managed to explain.
• Improve by at least an order of magnitude what others have done.

2. Before you ever pick up your pen…

• What is your message? What point are you making? Most papers should make a single point.
• Why is this message important? Why should the reader take his precious time to read your paper?
• How are you going to make your point? What experiments can you run? What theorems can you prove?
• Has this point been made before? How is your contribution different from what has been said a thousand times before?

3. What a good paper should contain

• A sexy start: tell the reader early why he should read your paper. Don’t summarize, sell! A good abstract answers the question why should I read this paper?, it does not summarize the paper. Convince us early that your paper is important. Starting out the paper by a punch line is important. For example, the Kent Beck recipe for a good 4-sentence abstract is: (1) state the problem (2) say why it is interesting (3) say what your solution achieves (4) say what follows from your solution.
• You should clearly say what your contribution is. Reviewers are lazy, they do not want to have to figure out what your message is. Spend some time telling us exactly what your contribution is. Spell it out, do not assume we will read the paper carefully.
• A review of related work in the introduction: you can relate your own contribution to all of the related work.
• A large reference section: people like to be cited, so make sure you cite every paper that might have some relevance.
• Experimental evidence: you need to confront your idea with the real-world and report on how well it fares. Compare explicitly your results with the best results elsewhere.
• Acknowledgement the limitations of your work.
• Relevant and non-obvious theoretical results: it is easier for people to build on your work if there is some theory and it helps give people confidence in your work.
• Pictures! Really, even if you feel silly doing it or that you think you can’t draw. A picture can help tremendously in communicating difficult ideas.
• Original examples over original data sets.
• A conclusion telling us about future work and summarizing (again) the strong points of the paper.

5. What a good paper should not contain

• Weak unnecessary results: if you derived ten theorems but only one is necessary, throw the rest of them in your drawers. I do not want to know about useless results!
• Technical details: technical papers made of several small ideas are usually not interesting.

6. Good pedagogy and style

• Use strong verbs (replace “we made use of categorization” by “we categorized”).
• Always give the example first, and the result next.
• Use as few parenthesis, footnotes and bold characters as you can.
• Use a spell checker. Just do it.
• Use a tool such as style-check.rb to check for verbose phrases and other common mistakes.
• Learn about and use unbreakable spaces.
• Do not use negations…
• Avoid UA (useless acronyms).
• DUAT: Do not use acronyms in titles.
• Your writing will be in an active voice… (hint: avoid the verb “to be”).
• Employ uncomplicated terms.
• Learn to use the em-dash—it is a good friend.
• Short sentences—no more than 15 words—are better.

7. Words you can do without

• Temporal words such as “now”, “next” are either useless or a sign of a bad structure.
• Most adverbs such as “very” are useless in a research paper.
• Keep your emotions in check: the reader may not care for your surprise, pleasure and sadness.

8. Run through this check list before submission

• Are section headers consistent with respect to case? (”Our Methodology” versus “Our algorithm”)
• Do the figures look nice? Are the fonts large enough for easy browsing? Are they readable once printed out in black-and-white? Can we see any compression artifacts?
• If the page limit is x pages, do you have an x pages long paper?
• Do you have at least one figure?
• Is the layout of each page elegant?
• Do you have widows or orphans?
• Did you spell check?
• Do you have a step-by-step toy example for every new algorithm being introduced? Present your examples early.
• Are all equations arithmetically correct?
• Can you replace some mathematical notation by plain English?
• Are all terms defined?
• Is the mathematical notation consistent? (If you use t for time in the first section, do you use t to note the term in the second section?)
• Are the title and the abstract geared toward making the paper attractive?
• Do you summarize your contribution in the introduction?
• Is the bibliography consistent? (If you abbreviate first names once, do it all the way through. If you have page numbers once, have page numbers throughout.)
• Is the spelling of all proper names correct? You would hate to get your paper reviewed by someone who would find his name misspelt in your paper.
• Are the captions correct? Do you put the table caption before or after the table? Do you put the figure caption before or after the figure? Do you center captions or not?
• Do you refer to a figure as “Fig. 1″ or as “Figure 1″? Which one is correct?
• Are all internal references correct? If you refer to Fig. 10, does Figure 10 exists? (Some LaTeX package can mess this up, so always check!) Are all tables and figures referenced in the text?
• If this is a recurring conference or a journal, have you compared your paper with ten or so other articles to make sure that yours is consistent with how these other papers look and feel?
• Do you use the right fonts? Be watchful: sometimes the font for the section header can differ from the font used in the main text.

9. How to write more than one good paper

Write daily for at least 15 to 30 minutes, ideally two hours. Studies show this is the key to becoming a prolific writer.

(Daniel Lemire)