Tips on Writing Research Papers

(the following is a very short summary of the paper How to Get Your SIGGRAPH Paper Rejected by Jim Kajiya, SIGGRAPH 93 Papers Chair)
  1. Briefly summarize the paper. This question really is a sanity check to make sure the reviewer understood the paper.
  2. What does this paper contribute to the field. Is your paper a pioneering new direction? Or is it just a small delta over previous work? Your paper will get rejected unless you make it very clear, up front, what you think your paper has contributed.
  3. State the problem you're solving. If you don't explicitly state the problem you're solving, the context of your problem and solution, and how your paper differs (and improves upon) previous work, you're trusting that the reviewers will figure it out.
  4. Is the paper stimulating? Is your paper likely to create a new direction for research? Are people going to read your paper and want to extend your ideas? 
  5. Is the paper of interest to the audience? Does your paper solve a long-standing problem that people want to know how to solve? Well, to get rejected, pick a subject no one cares about.
  6. Is the paper well written? Your paper might be so poorly written that no one could figure out what you were saying. You must make your paper easy to read.
  7. Can an experienced practitioner in the field duplicate the results from the paper and the references? Basically the question is about completeness.
  8. You must write a dynamite introduction. If you do it clearly and succinctly, you set the proper context for understanding the rest of your paper. Only then should you go about describing what you've done.
  9. Pay attention on pictures. If you have good-looking pictures, you've got your foot in the door. Reviewers first look at the pictures in your paper. If your pictures are really good looking, they're going to go to some effort to find out how you did them.
  10. Use pictures’ captions like a storyteller. Articles in some scientific newspaper are constructed so that you can get the point of the article just by reading the captions to the illustrations.

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