---------------------------------------------------------------------- How to write a paper (for the COMSOC course) Ulle Endriss, 30/11/2010 (last update: 12/10/2011) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For the course, you are supposed to write a paper reviewing (part of) a recent paper from the literature (or possibly several such papers) and including a modest original contribution extending the work of the paper you have chosen to review. Write your paper in the style of a Computer Science conference paper (see e.g. the IJCAI, AAAI or AAMAS papers listed on the course website for examples of such papers). What follows are some guidelines and tips for writing papers. Some of these may not directly translate to, say, writing a paper for a Maths journal or a philosophical treatise. Also, some of the tips are specific to the assignment (which is largely about reviewing other people's work). Still, much of it should be useful in general. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TITLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Choose a meaningful title for your paper. Do not just copy the title of the paper you are reviewing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Your paper should start with a short abstract (around 150-250 words). The abstract should summarise what the paper is about. It should be easy to understand and it should be self-contained. This means that you should not include any citations. However, for this very particular assignment (reviewing another paper) an exception to this rule might be in order: if you want to, you can refer to the paper you are reviewing (but still don't use a formal reference to the bibliography, but rather write something like "We are discussing a paper by K.J. Arrow, published in /The Journal of Political Economy/ in 1950, in which he shows that ...".) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Start by introducing and motivating your topic. Maybe you can start by describing an application that is obviously useful and then show how your research question is relevant to that application. Or you might want to start with a broad statement about an established area of research and then zoom in to explain where your own topic is located with respect to widely known and widely accepted issues. Try to actually get to your topic by the end of the first paragraph (that is, don't spend a full page on background material before getting to the actual topic of your paper). Use the rest of the introduction to set the stage for the body of the paper, without getting too technical. Sometimes it might be appropriate to already discuss related work in the introduction. The introduction should end with a short "paper overview"-paragraph. For each section, say (usually in one short sentence) what it is about. This paragraph may very well duplicate information from the body of the introduction. This is fine (it serves as a kind of table of contents of the paper, in a place where people will look for it). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SECTION 2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 2 is often used to introduce basic terminology, notation, and definitions, both basic standard definitions and the central definitions of the specific framework you are working with or are proposing in your paper. This kind of sections is often called "Preliminaries" or "The Model" (meaning the formal framework used) or similarly. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MIDDLE SECTIONS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The body of the paper will consist of a number of additional sections. Avoid having too many sections. Do structure your sections using subsections. But never /start/ a section with a subsection (that is, the \section command should not be directly followed by a \subsection command; there should be something in between). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CONCLUSION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Conclude your paper with a (usually) short section that (i) summarises what you have done, (ii) evaluates the results, and (iii) outlines some idea for future work. In the summary, you might want to highlight the most important findings. Evaluation means to critically assess to what extent the goals set out in the beginning of the paper have been achieved (in most cases you will be able to report partial success, and it is important to point out both what went well and where there is room for improvement). A typical mistake made by students is to mention that you were running out of time as a reason why a particular goal has not been achieved. Of course, this can happen (it always does), but it is of no interest for the paper (instead, what matters here are things such as difficulties inherent to the problem and general limitations of the approach). Future work might include things you plan to do yourself as well as things that you generally consider interesting (and, at least in principle, feasible). As someone who has just immersed themselves into the topic and therefore probably has a better understanding of the very specific problem studied than almost anybody else, your opinion on what is important and what is feasible in this area will be useful for others considering whether or not to get involved. A specialist should be able to derive some value from the conclusion section without having read the rest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EXPLANATIONS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Keep in mind that a lot of what you cover is probably quite difficult (it's easy to forget how many hours it took you to understand what's going on when you started!). Try to both explain things informally and state them formally. For instance, you might first want to paraphrase a theorem in plain English, then state it formally (inside a theorem-environment) using the best possible formal notation you can think of, then give the proof (which will also help interpreting the theorem), and after the proof repeat again the main argument of the proof in plain English. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RELATED WORK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You should compare what you (and, for this specific assignment, what the authors of the paper you are reviewing) have done to related work in the literature. Again, for this specific assignment, don't just reformulate the comments on related work from the original paper, but form your own opinion, and possibly find other related work that the original authors may have overlooked. Sometimes it makes sense to include a section specifically devoted to related work. Personally, I often don't like these sections very much: if people just write a sequence of sentences of the form "X and Y have done Z, which is different from what we have done", then that's not very interesting. Often you can do a better job by describing a specific piece of related work exactly at the point in your own paper where you are actually doing something similar to that piece of related work. This allows for a much deeper analysis. Having said this, of course, there are some papers with very good "related work" sections, that give a nice and helpful overview of a particular strand of the literature. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- REFERENCES ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The last section of your paper (though possibly followed by an appendix) should be a list of bibliographic references. List everything you cite; cite everything you list. Cite all your sources. Make sure you have actually consulted everything you list (this need not mean that you have read all those papers from start to end). Include all the standard bibliographic information with each reference (e.g., for a journal paper this means: authors, title, journal name, volume, issue number, page numbers, year). BibTeX is a useful tool for organising your bibliography (but beware that it sometimes prints everything in lowercase by default---no "nash equilibria" and "turing machines", please!). As space restrictions are not overly strict, I recommend that you use a bibstyle in which authors' names are spelt out inside citations. Make sure your sentences involving citations make sense: "Arrow (1950) proved a nice theorem" is perfect. "Arrow [17] proved a nice theorem" (assuming you do use a numerical bibstyle and [17] is Arrow's paper) is also fine. "(Arrow, 1950) proved a nice theorem" is not ok, and anybody writing "[17] proved a nice theorem" will burn in hell. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PRESENTATION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You should put considerable effort into polishing your paper. Pay attention to grammar. Use the right kind of language. Be as formal as is appropriate, but not boring. Always use a spell-checker. Typos are unacceptabel. Pay attention to formatting issues: be proud of your work and make it look nice. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ASSESSMENT ---------------------------------------------------------------------- When marking your paper, I will use similar criteria as are being used to review papers submitted to a conference: * Relevance: Usually, this criterion is about whether the paper is relevant to the conference it is submitted to. For this assignment, this criterion will not play an overly important role (but I will be happy to see attempts to link your own work to topics covered in the course, particularly when those connections are not immediately obvious). * Significance: Is the contribution scientifically significant? Will people be interested? Does it solve a problem that needs solving? Will people be able to use it for their own work? Will it influence others? For your own original contribution I will apply this criterion directly (though very mildly). For the review part of your paper (i.e., the main part), I will slightly reinterpret this criterion and look whether your assessment of the significance of the paper you are reviewing seems appropriate. * Originality: Does the paper include ideas that are genuinely new? * Technical Soundness: Are the results correct? Are they verifiably correct, i.e., is it possible to check the proofs (with reasonable effort on behalf of the reviewer)? For experimental work, is the experimentation methodology adopted sound? Of course, due to space restrictions, you may be forced to omit some details, but it should always be possible to reconstruct what you have done and to then come to the same results, at least in principle. * Scholarship: Does the author give due credit to others for their work? Clearly differentiate your own contributions from those of others (this also means not being overly modest about your own contributions). * Clarity: Is the paper easy to understand (even when the subject matter might be difficult)? I will place great emphasis on this criterion when marking your papers. * Presentation: Is the paper well structured? This also covers issues such as grammar and orthography, quality of figures, etc. ----------------------------------------------------------------------