How to Write Academic Paper (from CS Perspective)
Notes
- Advice from my advisor
- Start writing papers even before start working on it
- the coding takes time, the execution takes more time
- but by writing you can find the caveat faster
- Paper (when finished) must have only ONE SHARP idea
- if you have multiple ideas, write multiple papers
- Write paper around one single idea
- maybe when you are writing you dont know which idea
- but when you are at the end, you should know which idea
- and then reframe the whole paper circling around that idea
- Think about your readers
- you want to give reader knowledge in the easiest way possible
- read from the reader perspective
- is it easy to understand?
- is you main idea just ping on the user's mind?
- send to your colleagues
- ask them where they got lost
- or where they got bored
- or where they lose the enthusiasm to read it
- Introduction
- write motivation
- write contribution
- write contributions as interesting that the readers say "oh gosh, we need to read the paper to find it out how they did it"
- use tension-release cycle -- there is a problem (tension), but we solved (release) it by ...
- forward reference your sections from claims where the claim was substantiated
- Related work
- go to the end just before conclusion
- its not interesting, only used to connect your papers to other studies
- but only read by people who is finding papers
- you dont have to make others look bad to be good
- give credit where its due and show what you have improved on that
- Summarized advices
- dont wait: start writing, even with not fully blown idea
- identify your key idea (at least by the end of writing)
- tell a story
- Pose the problem, ask a question, pose a solution, note problems that arise, address them, denouement
- nail your contributions (ideally in 1st page / intro)
- related work: later
- Put your readers first (use examples that will make easier for them to understand)
- Send to colleagues for review
- plots
References:
Slides
Some better resources: