Scientific communication
Collection of tips based on the following content:
Academic Writing
A rough framework for writing a generic paper (i.e. not for e.g. a review paper) is as follows
- Make a working title.
- Introduce the topic and define (informally for now) terminology.
- Introduce the motivation - explain why the topic is important.
- Relate to current literature.
- Mention the gap and what needs to be done.
- Introduce research question formally.
- Introduce necessary background material.
- Introduce formal definitions.
- Introduce methods being proposed.
- Describe experimental setup, and what the experiments aim to show.
- Describe the data used in the experiments.
- Summarize the results with figures/tables.
- Discuss the results.
- Explain any conflicting results, unexpected findings and/or conflicts with other research.
- Describe the limitations.
- Describe the importance of the findings.
- Mention possible directions for further research.
- Acknowledges and references.
One important principle: Do not make the reviewer of your paper think.
First impressions are important - a good introduction with a good motivation is half your success. The first page should answer the following questions:
- What is the problem?
- Why is it interesting and important?
- Why is it hard, and why do naive approaches fail?
- Why hasn’t it been solved before? Or what is missing is the previous proposed solutions?
- What are the key components being proposed?
Directly quote other papers if suitable.
Making good figures
- Look into datavizproject for ideas on figures.
Giving a talk
Making a poster
Thoughts
- TODO Put notes on academic writing guides, posters, figures, how to give presentations etc.
- On creating illustrations, inkscape tutorials, and on making figures in general, read Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures. (make a node on these later on).
- Shakir’s blog post on writing.