CPE%20626%20Writing%20Scholarly%20Papers

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CPE 626 Writing Scholarly Papers

• Aleksandar Milenkovic
• E-mail milenka_at_ece.uah.edu
• Web http//www.ece.uah.edu/milenka

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Why Are We Bothering?

• Useful for writing your final report.
• Useful to know the style for doing future
  research.
• This is how academics communicate
• You should know the technique
• Proven over time

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Sources

• Stephen A. Edwards lecture slides
• http//www.cs.columbia.edu/sedwards/
• Veljko Milutinovic
• V. Milutinovic, The Best Method for
  Presentation of Research Results,IEEE TCCA
  Newsletter, Sep. 1996.http//tab.computer.org/tcc
  a/NEWS/sept96/bestmeth.pdf

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Research Papers

• Clear statement of the problem being addressed
• What has been done before and what is new
• Proposed solution
• Results achieved
• Literature survey should have included the first
  two
• Final report should include all four

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Typical Outline

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Related Work
• Description of problem solution
• Experimental results
• Conclusions and future work
• Bibliography

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The Abstract

• Short
• 2-3 paragraphs
• 100-150 words
• Introduce problem in first paragraph
• Describe your approach in second
• Brief conclusions and impact in third
• Abstract must stand alone as pure English
• No bibliographic citations
• No mathematics

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A Sample Abstract

• Improvement of the branch predictors has been one
  of focal points in the computer architecture
  research during the last decade, from two-level
  predictors to the use of genetic algorithms. The
  most of the research efforts try to use the real,
  already implemented, branch predictor sizes and
  organization for comparison and evaluation. Yet,
  a little is known about exact predictor
  implementation in Intel processors, apart from a
  few size hints in the Intel manuals and a
  valuable but unverified hacker efforts. On the
  other hand, Intel processors include performance
  monitoring counters that can count the events
  related to branches, and Intel provides a
  powerful VTune Performance Analyzer enabling the
  easy access to performance counters.
• In this paper, we propose a series of simple
  experiments that explore the organization and
  size of a branch predictor, and use it to
  investigate Pentium III and Pentium 4 predictor
  implementations.
• Experiments showed that BTB has 4 ways in both
  implementations. PIII predictor has just the
  local history component, while P4 has both global
  and local history components. Such knowledge
  could be used in further predictor research, as
  well as in the design of new, architecture-ware
  compilers.

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The Introduction

• Describe both the area youre working on and
  what youve found
• Cut to the chase early My field is interesting
  and heres what Ive done
• Dont repeat the abstract
• Orient the readers about what they should expect
• Some references are appropriate here, but they
  need not be exhaustive

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Related Work

• Describe the relevant work of others
• You wont be exactly duplicating their work, so
  contrast your results with theirs
• Be respectful to authors
• Smith 1 describes a system for real-time
  scheduling
• Dont use citations as nouns
• In 1, a system for real-time scheduling is
  described

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Goals of the Related Work Section

• Orient the reader
• Part of your job is to figure out the state of
  the field and communicate that clearly
• They need to know how your work is a huge step
  forward from what youve done
• Convince the reader you are knowledgeable
• Academics work by consensus
• Theres an accepted body of knowledge
• Yours wont be added to it unless you understand
  and acknowledge it, too

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Bibliography

• Many different styles that differ only slightly
• All have the same goal of providing enough
  information so that a reader can find what you
  read
• Information in most citations
• Author(s) of the work
• Title of the work
• Where it appeared (if a conference or journal
  publication)
• Date (at least year) at which it appeared

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Example Bibliographic Entries

• A paper in a conference
• 1 A. Milenkovic, V. Milutinovic, "Cache
  Injection A Novel Technique for Tolerating
  Memory Latency in Bus-Based SMPs," Lecture Notes
  in Computer Science, vol. 1900, Proceedings of
  the 6th International Euro-Par Conference,
  Munich, Germany, August/September 2000, pp.
  558-566.
• Authors names, Title, Conference title,
  Conference Location, Month 20xx, pp. xx-yy.

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Example Bibliographic Entries

• A book
• 2 M. J. Smith, Application-Specific Integrated
  Circuits, Addison-Wesley, New York, 1997.
• Author, Title, Publisher, 19xx.

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Example Bibliographic Entries

• A journal paper
• 1 A. Milenkovic,"Achieving High Performance in
  Bus-Based Shared Memory Multiprocessors," IEEE
  Concurrency, Vol. 8, No. 3, July-September 2000,
  pp. 36-44.
• Author(s), Title, Journal, Vol. x, No. y,
  month, 20xx, pp. xx-yy.

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Example Bibliographic Entries

• A technical manual
• 1 M. D. Smith, Energy-efficient cache memories,
  Phd Thesis, University of Alabama in Huntsville,
  2001.
• Author(s). Title, Organization, 20xx.

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Citing Web Pages

• URLs are not generally considered reasonable
  scholarly citations
• Not peer-reviewed
• Very fragile
• Can easily be changed
• Best used for pointing people to projects or
  companies

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The Body

• Describe what youve done with reasonable detail
• Make sure to describe any unexpected or
  particularly difficult problems
• Goal is to simplify life for those in the future
• Describe what you did and how it turned out
• No requirement to include everything
• Thanks, but thats a little more information
  than I needed to know.

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Clear Writing

• Be concise
• This is the main goal
• Think of it as an engineering problem
• How can I communicate using the fewest words?
• Be emphatic
• Avoid passive constructions

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Clear Writing

• Avoid wordy idioms
• Instead of Prefer
• make assumption assume
• is a function of depends on
• is an illustration of illustrates
• Avoid inactive verbs
• Avoid writing to be
• Not In Smith, a clear-cut distinction was made
  
• Instead Smith made a clear-cut distinction

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Clear Writing

• Start each paragraph with a topic sentence
• You will be amazed by how much this helps.
  People will sing your praises. Professors will
  grade you higher. Your peers will call you The
  Exalted One. Little children will bow in your
  presence.
• Technical writing is not a murder mystery
• Explain whodunit immediately
• Suspense is not the point

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That vs. Which

• Restrictive clauses use that
• Added to constraint the number of different
  things being considered
• Dont need commas
• Buildings that have white walls are common
  here.
• Nonrestrictive clauses use which
• Added to give additional information without
  changing collection being considered
• Need commas
• Stucco buildings, which have white walls, are
  common here.

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Experimental Results

• Include important results that actually show
  something
• Avoid including endless tables or graphs if they
  dont further your point
• Clearly label and explain how to interpret your
  graph
• What are you measuring?
• What are you controlling?
• What is your experimental setup?

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Experimental Results

• Dont do this

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Experimental Results

• Graphs often illustrate trends and behaviors much
  more clearly than tables
• Consider using graphics where you can
• Often much more succinct

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Conclusion Section

• Here, summarize the results, say what worked and
  what didnt, and explain what remains to be done
• Be careful not to save the best for last
• Ive read many papers where the contents of the
  conclusions section should have been written in
  the introduction
• This is not a murder mystery

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Paper Format

• Most conferences and workshops require a common
  format
• Two columns
• 10 point
• Usually Times Roman
• Single-spaced
• Paper is precious dont waste it