How to write a great research paper - Simon Peyton Jones from Microsoft

Don't wait: write

Your idea-> Write paper -> Do research

• Forces us to be clear, focused
• Crystallizes what we don't understand
• opens the way to dialogue with others: reality check, critique, and collaboration

writing papers is a primary mechanism for doing research(not just for reporting it)

Don't be intimidate

• Writing a paper, and give a talk, about any idea, no matter how insignificant it may seem to you
• Writing the paper is how you develop the idea in the first place
• It usually turns out to be more interesting and challenging than it seemed at first

Identify your key idea

Your goal: to convey a useful and re-usable idea

• You want to infect the mind of your reader with your idea, like a virus
• Papers are far more durable than programs

The greatest ideas are literally worthless if you keep them to yourself

The idea: A re-usable insight useful to the reader

• Your paper should have just one "ping": one clear, sharp idea
• You may not know what the ping is when you start writing, but you must know when you finish
• If you have lots of ideas, write lots of papers

Can you hear the "ping"?

• Many papers contain good ideas, but do not distill what they are.
• Make certain that the reader is in no doubt what the idea is. Be 100% explicit:
  • The main idea of this paper is...
  • In this section, we present the main contributions of the paper...

Tell a story

Your narrative flow: Imagine you are explaining on a whiteboard

• Here is a problem
• It's an interesting problem
• It's an unsolved problem
• Here's my idea
• My idea works (details, data)
• Here's how my idea compares to other people's approaches

Structure(conference paper)

• Title(1000 readers)
• Abstract(4 sentences, 100 readers)
• Introduction(1 page, 100 readers)
• The problem(1 page, 10 readers)
• My idea(2 pages, 10 readers)
• The details(5 pages, 3 readers)
• Related work(1-2 pages, 10 readers)
• Conclusions and further work(0.5 pages)

Nail your contributions to the mast

The introduce:

• Describe the problem(Use an example to introduce the problem)
• State your contributions ...and that is all! ONE PAGE!

State your contributions(Bulleted list of contributions; contributions should be refutable)

• Write the list of contributions first
• The list of contributions drives the entire paper: the paper substantiates the claims you made
• The reader thinks "gosh, if they can really deliver this, that's exciting; I'd better read on"

Evidence

• Your introduction makes claims
• The body of the paper provides evidence to support each claim
• Check each claim in the introduction, identify the evidence, and forward-reference it from the claim
• "Evidence" can be: analysis and comparison, theorems, measurements, case studies

No “rest of this paper is...”

• Not: “The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the problem. Section 3 ...Finally, Section 8 concludes”.
• Instead, use forward references from the narrative in the introduction. The introduction (including the contributions) should survey the whole paper, and therefore forward reference every important part.

Related work: later

To leave related work in the end, before the conclusion No related work yet!

• Problem 1: the reader knows nothing about the problem yet; so your (highly compressed) description of various technical tradeoffs is absolutely incomprehensible
• Problem 2: describing alternative approaches gets between the reader and your idea

Fallacy: To make my work look good, I have to make other people’s work look bad. Giving credit to others does not diminish the credit you get from your paper

• Warmly acknowledge people who have helped you
• Be generous to the competition
• Acknowledge weaknesses in your approach

Put your readers first

Presenting the idea

• Explain it as if you were speaking to someone using a whiteboard
• Conveying the intuition is primary, not secondary
• Once your reader has the intuition, she can follow the details (but not vice versa)
• Even if she skips the details, she still takes away something valuable

Conveying the intuition Introduce the problem, and your idea, using EXAMPLES and only then present the general case

Putting the reader first

• Do not recapitulate your personal journey of discovery. This route may be soaked with your blood, but that is not interesting to the reader.
• Instead, choose the most direct route to the idea.

Listen to your readers

Getting help

• Experts are good
• Non-experts are also very good
• Each reader can only read your paper for the first time once! So use them carefully
• Explain carefully what you want (“I got lost here” is much more important than “Jarva is mis-spelled”.) Get your paper read by as many friendly guinea pigs as possible

Getting expert help

• A good plan: when you think you are done, send the draft to the competition saying “could you help me ensure that I describe your work fairly?”.
• Often they will respond with helpful critique (they are interested in the area)
• They are likely to be your referees anyway, so getting their comments or criticism upfront is Jolly Good.

Listening to your reviewers

• Read every criticism as a positive suggestion for something you could explain more clearly
• DO NOT respond “you stupid person, I meant X”. INSTEAD: fix the paper so that X is apparent even to the stupidest reader.
• Thank them warmly. They have given up their time for you.

Treat every review like gold dust. Be (truly) grateful for criticism as well as praise. This is really, really, really hard. But it’s really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really important

Language and Style

Basic stuff

• Submit by the deadline
• Keep to the length restrictions
  • Do not narrow the margins
  • Do not use 6pt font
  • On occasion, supply supporting evidence (e.g. experimental data, or a written-out proof) in an appendix
• Always use a spell checker

Visual structure

• Give strong visual structure to your paper using
  • sections and sub-sections
  • bullets
  • italics
  • laid-out code
• Find out how to draw pictures, and use them

Use the active voice

Use simple, direct language