The A to Z of Getting Published and Maximising your Research Impact" one day workshop

1. Some Points on
Publishing Research Results
Mehrnoush Shamsfard
Dean of Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering

2. Answering to:
 How to read a Paper?
 How to structure a good Paper?
 How to write a readable Paper?
 How to select a right Call for Paper?

3. Why read papers
 So you know what’s happening
 Avoid reinventing the wheel
 does happen commonly,
too many wheels already
 Find interesting research topics

4. Why not to read papers
 Cannot read everything
 Should not read everything
 Can suppress innovation
 once you see solutions using a particular theme,
often hard to think differently

5. Read or not to read,
that is the question
 Read, of course
 Know what’s important
 Know what can be ignored without significant
loss of information

6. What to read
 Major conferences
 Journals are a few years behind, but still can be
useful
 Tech reports from active research groups
 need to know which groups to look up
 Survey / overview papers
 ACM Computing Surveys
 CACM, IEEE Computer, Spectrum
 more technical - IEEE Personal Communications, …
 newsletters - ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGMOBILE, ...

7. What’s in a paper
 Abstract
 Introduction
 Motivation
 Problem description
 Solution
 ...
 Performance Analysis
 Conclusions
 Future Work

8. How to read a paper?
Know why you want to read the paper
 To know what’s going on (e.g., scanning
proceedings)
 title, authors, abstract
 Papers in your broad research area
 introduction, motivation, solution description, summary,
conclusions
 sometimes reading more details useful, but not always
 Papers you may want to improve on
 read entire paper carefully

9. What to note
 Authors and research group
 Need to know where to look for a paper on
particular topic
 Theme of the solution
 Should be able to go back to the paper if you need
more info
 Approach to performance evaluation
 Note any shortcomings

10. More Details to Note
 The problem
 What are the new/ important/ unsolved aspects
 Previous solutions
 What are the shortcomings or differences
 Current solution
 What are the superiorities and limitations
 What are the presuppositions
 Results
 Pros and cons/ Best and worst results
 Evaluation methods / Test conditions
 Further work

11. So this paper is in print ...
 Be skeptical
 If it sounds too good to be true, it often is

12. How to Write

13. The Structure
 Authors and Affiliations
 Abstract
 Introduction
 Related Work
 The Main Contribution
 Results and Discussions
 Conclusion and Further Work

14. How to write a paper
The IMRAD structure:
 Introduction answers “why?”
 Methods answers “when, where, how, how
much?”
 Results answers “what?”
And
 Discussion answers “so what?”

15. How to write a paper
 Most papers are not that exceptional
 Good writing makes significant difference
 Better to say little clearly, than saying too
much unclearly

16. Readability a must
 If the paper is not readable, author has not
given writing sufficient thought
 Two kinds of referees
 If I cannot understand the paper, it is the writer’s
fault
 If I cannot understand the paper, I cannot reject it
 Don’t take chances. Write the paper well.
 Badly written papers typically do not get read

17. Do not irritate the reader
 Define notation before use
 If you use much notation, make it easy to find
 summarize most notation in one place
 Avoid Using Too Many Acronyms
 AUTMA ?!
 You may know the acronyms well.
Do not assume that the reader does (or cares to)

18. How to write a theory paper
 Unreadability is not the same as formalism
 Reader should be able to understand
contributions without reading all details
 If some proofs are not too important, relegate
them to an appendix
 Proofs are not as worthy as new proof techniques

19. How to write a systems paper
 Provide sufficient information to allow people to
reproduce your results
 people may want to reproduce exciting results
 besides, referees expect the information
 Do not provide wrong information
 Sometimes hard to provide all details in available
space
 may be forced to omit some information
 judge what is most essential to the experiments
 cite a tech report for more information

20. Discuss related work
 Explain how your work relates to state of the art
 Discuss relevant past work by other people too
 Remember, they may be reviewing your paper.
 Avoid: The scheme presented by Shamsfard performs
terribly
 Prefer: The scheme by Shamsfard does not perform as
well in scenario X as it does in scenario Y
 Avoid offending people, unless you must

21. Discuss your own Results
 Why some results are obtained
 What happens if some parameters change
 What are the best and worst cases
 What are the bottlenecks, critical points,
limitations, pros and cons of your work

22. Tell them your shortcomings
 If your ideas do not work well in some
interesting scenarios, tell the reader
 People appreciate a balanced presentation

23. How to write weak results
 If results are not that great, come up with better ones
 Do not hide weak results behind bad writing
 Be sure to explain why results are weaker than you expected
 If you must publish: write well, but may have to go to
second-best conference or Journal
 Only a few conf/Journals in any area are worth publishing in
 Too many papers in poor conf/Journals bad for your
reputation
 Just because a conference is “IEEE” or “ACM” or
“International” does not mean it is any good
 If results not good enough for a decent conference,
rethink your problem/solution

24. Miscellaneous
 Read some well-written papers
 award-winning papers from conferences
 Some papers from your selected Journal
 Avoid long sentences
 Avoid too many paraphrasing
 Obey the writing style of the publisher
 Correctly cite the others
 Write about the problem and the solution clearly
 Point to your contribution(s) explicitly
 If you have nothing to say, say nothing

25. How to select a right Call for Paper?

26. Impact factor
 In any given year, the impact factor of a journal is the
average number of citations received per paper
published in that journal during the two preceding
years.
 "Citable items" for this calculation are usually articles,
reviews, proceedings, or notes; not editorials or
letters to the editor

27. Indexers and Rankers
 Indexing organizations
 ISI (Thomson reuters)
 SJR
 ISC
 Scopus
 DBLP
 …
 Ranking organizations

28. Metrics for Scientists
 H-Index:
 A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at
least h citations each, and the other (Np-h) papers have
no more than h citations each.
 M-Index:
 The m-index is defined as h/n, where n is the number of
years since the first published paper of the
scientist; also called m-quotient.
 i10-index
 Created by Google Scholar and used in Google's My
Citations feature. i10-Index = the number of
publications with at least 10 citations

29. Summary
 Read good papers
 Write good papers
 Publish in good conference/ journals

30. Useful references

Speaker’s Guide, Ian Parberry
http://hercule.csci.unt.edu/ian/guides/guides.html

The Best Method for Presentation of Research Results,
Veljko Milutinovic
http://rti.etf.bg.ac.rs/rti/ir3ppk/materijali/VM_the_best_method.pdf
 A comprehensive guide from the Power and Energy Society-
http://www.ieee-pes.org/publications/information-for-authors

31. References
 How to Read, Write, Present Papers, Nitin
H. Vaidya, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, 2002
 How to Write for Technical Periodicals &
Conferences, IEEE Authorship Series
(www.ieee.org/go/authorship)
 Writing a Scientific Research Paper,
https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ggilfoyl/intermediate/writing.pdf