Presentation made on October 2014, under invitation of NEIIST (Núcleo de estudantes de Engenharia Informática) - computer science and engineering student group. It is a translated and extended version of a previous presentation.

1. Miguel Pardal
Oct. 2014

2. LEIC 2000
Unisys Portugal
Lecturer at Técnico since 2002
MEIC 2006
Visiting student at MIT 2009
DEIC 2014
First publication in 2004
Since then, about 20 more
http://web.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/miguel.pardal

3. Share experience
Provide tools
Learn from you
Best thing about being a teacher

4. Guide by myself and Joana Pardal:
http://web.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/miguel.pardal/www/doc/ quick-guide-research.pdf
IEEE Authorship Series and toolbox:
http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/ authors/authors_journals.html

6. Technical report
Coursework or internal project
Workshop paper
Conference paper
Journal article
Book chapter
BookIncreasingpublic exposure

7. IEEExplore: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org
ACM: http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm
ACL: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new
AAAI: http://www.aaai.org/Library/library.php
Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/
Microsoft Academic: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/
Citeseer: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ …

8. Start with the best sources
Good conference ?
Accept rate < 20%
Only 1 in 5 submitted papers gets accepted
Good journal ?
Impact factor -average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal
Start with the more recent papers
They will cite older, relevant work in their references
Find out where the community gathers

9. Title
Abstract
Figures
Conclusion
References
Related work

10. Our research is only possible because of the work of others before us
Actual People, Universities, Labs
Identifier
Author name, year, (conference acronym, keywords)
Keep a reference repository

11. “X is better than Y!”
It needs to be grounded!
Work of others
Citations
Own work
Experimental results
Statistically valid

13. The work is (almost) complete
Is it worth writing?
YES
To write is to express thoughts into words
Use the third person, past tense
So that others may learn
Your own learning is not complete without the “distillation process” that comes with writing

14. Use the most common science language, so that your work may reach the widest audience
English
What about Portuguese and other languages?
Still important for scientific divulgation

15. Conference
Ongoing work
Journal
Fully developed and final findings
Journals have 3 times more citations, but
It is harder to be accepted
Conditional accepts
Takes a long time until final publication

16. Introduction
Problem
Related Work
Proposal
Methodology
Results
Discussion / Evaluation
Conclusion
Contributions
Future Work

17. 3 tells
Say what you will say
Say
Say what you said
Provide guidance and context to the reader

18. Move 1 –Establish the “territory”
Claiming centrality and/or
Making topic generalizations and/or
Reviewing items of previous research
Move 2 –Establish the niche
Counter-claiming or
Indicating a gap or
Question-raising or
Continuing a tradition
Move 3 –Occupy the niche
Outlining purposes or
Announcing present research
Announcing principle findings
Indicating Research article structure
http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Swalesian-Introduction

19. Process to increase the quality of the writing
Follow sound science practices
Reviews
Not always constructive
Do not get offended
It is not about you, it is about your work
You should be the first to know that there is always something to improve…

20. English quality
Structure
Literature review
Complete and to the point
Motivation for decisions
Rigor
Avoid misunderstandings
Identify the limitations of your own work
They will be found anyway (sooner or later)
They are future work opportunities

23. Widely used
Produces documents with excellent aesthetics
Easy to follow template rules
Built-in support for mathematical expressions.
Generates the reference list automatically!
BibTeX
It is a programming language (with comments)
These are the main contributions:
% do not forget to add the prototype!

28. Science is personal and social
People and communities are central
Read
Learn from other authors
Cite them
Write
Explain in a concise way
Learn from the reviewers
Share with others

29. Miguel.Pardal@tecnico.ulisboa.pt
Obrigado
Thank you
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton