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)
- Briefly summarize the paper.
This question really is a sanity check to make sure the reviewer
understood the paper.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- Can an experienced
practitioner in the field duplicate the results from the paper and the
references? Basically the
question is about completeness.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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