Scientific Writing

Chapter 5: Writing a Paper

Writing for Computer Science

Introduction

Computer Science

Information Systems

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Prepared by:

• Yusra Hafizi
• Mastora Darwish

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Main topics

• The Scope Of a Paper
• Telling a Story
• Organization
• The First Draft
• From Draft To Submission
• Co-Authoring
• Theses
• Getting It Wrong

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writing

• In every research project, a stage is reached at which it makes sense to begin to write up. Shaping the research and its outcomes into a write-up is an effective way of giving structure to a project. 
• The three main phases of a write-up are organizing materials so that the work tells a story, giving this story the structure of a thesis or of an academic paper, and actually writing.
• A paper or thesis is an outcome of a cycle of activity, from speculation through definition and experimentation to writing. Although a research paper or thesis is the result of a process of research that may have been proceeding for months or years.

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The Scope of The Paper

• To begin a paper, the first task is to describe your aims.
• Next, define the scope of the work that you plan to write up. Typically, by this stage your research has become focused on a small number of specific questions. A valuable exercise at this stage is to speculate on the format and scope of the results.
• You might start, for example, by asking questions such as:
• Which results are the most surprising?
• What is the one result that other researchers might adopt in their work?
• What is the key background work that has to be discussed?

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The Scope of The Paper(continued)

• Making choices about the content of a paper places limits on its scope; These choices identify material to be excluded. At some point it is necessary to stop undertaking new work and write up what has been achieved so far.
• New ideas will always come but have to stop write
• Completion of old work is vital to understand future works, else you will end up with too many results.
• Another element in the process of developing a paper is deciding where the work might be published. One important point at this stage is to publish your work somewhere relevance to your topic.

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Telling a Story

• Paper is not about day to day activities of your research; also not an unstructured collection of information and results.
• A strong thesis or paper has a story-like flow, with a sequence of concepts building from a foundation of knowledge assumed to be common to all readers up to new ideas and results. An effective paper leads readers from what they already know to new knowledge you want them to learn. For this reason, the body of a good paper should have a logical flow.
• Information that should be in the paper can be verified
• Things that you know at the time you started your research can be considered as natural stuff that could be avoided from the research paper.
• Write whatever you learnt from your research starting time till now.

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Telling a Story(cont.)

• There are several common ways for structuring the body of a paper, including as a chain, by specificity, by example, and by complexity.
• The most common structure is the first one, a chain in which the results and background are based on logical order for presentation of material. First might come, say, a problem statement, then a review of previous solutions and their drawbacks, then the new solution, and finally a demonstration that the solution
• One option is to structure the material in terms of general terms(specificity), then fill in the details as you go along.
• Another structure is by example, in which the idea or result is initially explained by, say, applying it to some typical problem. Then the idea can be explained more formally, in a framework the example has made concrete and familiar.
• A final alternative is to structure the body by complexity. For example, a simple case can be given first, then a more complex case can be explained as an extension, This approach is a kind of tutorial: the reader is brought by small steps to the full result.

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Organization

• Scientific papers are written in a way that allows readers to quickly discover the main results, and then examine the supporting evidence. Many readers accept or reject conclusions based on a quick scan, not having time to read all the papers Describe the work in the context of accepted scientific knowledge.
• State the idea that is being investigated, often as a theory or hypothesis.
• Explain what is new about the idea, what is being evaluated, or what contribution the paper is making.
• Justify the theory, by methods such as proof or experiment.

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Organization  �

A typical write-up has most of the following components:

• Title and author
• Papers begin with their title and information about authors including name, affiliation, and address.
• Naming style is your personal decision.
• But, maintain consistency between papers so that it is easier to index
• Abstract
• An abstract is  a single paragraph of about 50–200 words. The function of an abstract is to allow readers to know whether or not the paper is useful to them. It should therefore be a summary of the paper’s aims, scope, and conclusions.

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Organization

• Many abstracts follow a five-element organization:
• A general statement introducing the broad research area of the particular topic being investigated.
• An explanation of the specific problem (difficulty, obstacle, challenge) to be solved.
• A review of existing or standard solutions to this problem and their limitations.
• An outline of the proposed new solution.
• A summary of how the solution was evaluated and what the outcomes of the evaluation were.
• Thus a draft of an abstract can consist of five sentences, one for each of the points above.

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Organization

Introduction

• An introduction can be regarded as an expanded version of the abstract.
• Describes the paper’s topic, the problem being studied, references to key papers, the approach to the solution, the scope and limitations of the solution, and the outcomes.
• Should contain enough detail to allow readers to decide whether or not they need to read further.
• It can discuss the importance of the conclusions but should include only a brief summary of the supporting evidence, which the interested reader can find in the body of the paper.
• A paper isn’t a story in which results are kept secret until a surprise ending. The introduction should clearly tell the reader what in the paper is new and what the outcomes are. 
• By the end of the introduction, the reader should understand the scope of the work, and of the problem.

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Organization

Body

• should present the results.
• It  should provide necessary background and terminology, explain the chain of reasoning that leads to the conclusions, provide the details of central proofs, summarize any experimental outcomes, and state in detail the conclusions outlined in the introduction.
• Final structure: introduction-Background-Methods-Results-Discussion
• Results section: experimental outcomes, theorems, proofs, analyses of data, and tabulations of investigate outcomes and discoveries.
• Results must be explained, analyzed and interpreted.
• Important results should be summarized in a graph or a table.
• A background chapter may gather a variety of topics necessary to understanding of the contribution of the thesis, for example, whereas a chapter on a new algorithm may have a simple linear organization in which the parts of the algorithm are presented in turn.

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Organization

Literature Review

• A literature review, or survey, is used to compare the new results to similar previously published results, to describe existing knowledge, and to explain how it is extended by the new results.
• A survey can also help a reader who is not expert in the field to understand the paper. 
• The literature review can be early in a paper, to describe the context of the work, and might in that case be part of the introduction; or, less commonly, the literature review can follow or be part of the main body, at which point a detailed comparison between the old and the new can be made.
• In some papers the literature review material is not gathered into a single section, but is discussed where it is used.

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Organization

Conclusion

• The conclusions section, or summary, is used to draw together the topics discussed in the paper.
• An appropriate place to state (or restate) any limitations of the work. If you have no conclusions to draw, write "Summary", which is often the appropriate way to end a thesis chapter.

Bibliography

• A paper’s bibliography, or its set of references, is a complete list of theses, papers, books, and reports cited in the text. No other items should be included.

Appendices 

• The purpose of an appendix is to hold bulky material that would otherwise interfere with the narrative flow of the paper.
• Some papers have appendices giving detail of proofs or experimental results, and, where appropriate, listings of computer programs.

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The First Draft

• For the first draft of a write-up you may find it helpful to write freely without particular regard to style, layout, or punctuation.
• A last resort is to write in brief sentences making the simplest possible statements. If you tend to get stuck, just write anything, no matter how awful; but be sure to delete any ravings later.
• Best writing is through frequent, through revision.
• Mathematical content, definitions, and the problem statement should be made precise as early as possible
• Fine points are quickly forgotten once the work is complete. So write, early and regularly.
• Drafting of the technical chapters that contain the contribution tends to be relatively easy. The most difficult chapter is usually the background and literature review. If you finish the background first, it will seem as if the main task of writing the thesis is complete
• Introduction: challenging chapter to write; This is where the examiner meets author for the first time and it is important to make a good impression

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From Draft To Submission

• There are many ways of composing a technical paper, but one technique author used is to brainstorm; writing down in point form what has been learnt and what the results are.
• The next step is to prepare a skeleton, emphasize results and discarding material that seems irrelevant.
• After completing body and closing summary, revise introduction again.
• When the structure is complete, each section can be sketched in perhaps 20–200 words. The final version of the abstract is the last part to be written.
• When planning a schedule for completion of a thesis, you need to allow time for multiple revisions of each chapter.

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From Draft To Submission (continued)

• After draft is completed, review your chapters, consider every chapter needs supervisor review(one or two weeks) and two revisions.
• Students should keep a comprehensive file of notes as they proceed. This can include records of:
• Meetings.
• Decisions.
• Ideas.
• Expectations of outcomes.
• Papers you have read.
• Sketches of algorithms.
• Code versions.
• Theorems.
• Sources of data.
• Experiments and outcomes
• Sketches of proofs.

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Co-authoring �

• In computer science, most papers are co-authored
• There are a range of strategies for co-authoring, which vary from colleague to colleague and paper to paper.
• Instead of each writing part of the paper, one person writes a draft, the next revises and extends, and so on, with each person holding an exclusive lock on the paper while amending it.
• Co-authoring research papers is an effective way for students to improve their writing, but it does have its pitfalls, and agreed ground rules are needed to make it work.
• Don’t just delete someone’s writing. Just comment and discuss.

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Thesis

• A thesis is how research students present their work for examination.
• Three main points in Theses: command over fundamentals of the discipline, correctly interpret the results(when and how did it improve? Any limitations? When it is not applicable?), strong communication skills.
• It is a mistake to view a thesis as no more than an extended paper. A paper stands (or fails) on the strength of your demonstration of competence.
• Examiners are unlikely to be impressed by students who make grandiose claims about their work.
• Examiners focus on whether there is a clear, consistent presentation and a thorough critical analysis.

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Thesis (continued)

• The difference between a thesis and a paper is that a thesis may report on a series of more or less independent research discoveries. A typical paper, on the other hand, concerns a single consistent investigation. The scope of a thesis is more substantial than that of a paper, and the introduction should be broad in topic and conversational in tone.
• Theses can have negative and positive results. What is important is to answer these questions: what do the results imply? Where did the research succeed? Where did it fail? What problems were not solved? What questions are suggested?

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Getting It Wrong

common mistakes that researchers might make and  authors "get it wrong" are below: 

• Irrelevance 
• There are papers you cannot figure out what this paper is about, or why it matters.
• Sometimes there is a lack of connection to the literature on any particular topic, and thus no sense of what the author is trying to achieve.
• in some papers there is no obvious research question, no statement of aims or goals, and no claimed contribution.
• in some papers there is no standard dataset.

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Getting It Wrong

• Inconsistency, Inadequacy, and Incompleteness
• Some papers seem reasonable in parts, but the parts don't belong in the same document.
• Dataset used might not be relevant to problem
• There may be a detailed, insightful literature review, but it is either disconnected from the contribution or less interesting than the previous work that was described so well.
• Incomprehensibility
• Incomprehensibility stems from many causes, and takes many forms. For example: Abstract on the introduction is incoherent; first sentences of the abstract are too long and unclear.

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Getting It Wrong

• Ugliness 
• Illustrations and tables: graphs are badly designed, tables are irregular, parts of the diagrams are unrelated.
• Headings are not appropriate and not formatted properly.
• Font size and font change from paragraph to paragraph.
• Font type used and the colors are questionable.
• Errors like spelling errors, citation errors, garbled citations, incomplete sentences

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Getting It Wrong

• Ignorance 
• Commonly known knowledge is explained for many pages.
• Writing obvious statements or clearly false statements; opinions are made as facts; key past work is not cited
• Another display of ignorance is in relation to past literature, as noted above. All too often, authors have either paid no attention to key past work, or have not troubled to understand it properly and dismiss it in a few words.
• When the background and literature review are crushed into a few brief paragraphs, it is almost certain that the author has nothing to contribute.

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Getting It Wrong

• A writing up checklist 
• Regarding the scope of the work,
• In what forum, or kind of forum, do you plan to publish?
• Is the scope of the work well defined?
• Regarding how the write-up is organized and presented,
• What form will your write-up take?
• What other paper or thesis should your write- up resemble?
• Are you writing to a well-defined structure and organization?
• What are the sections, and how do they relate to each other?

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