How to Read, Critique, Write, and Present a Research Paper

John Cavazos Dept of Computer & Information Sciences University of Delaware www.cis.udel.edu/~cavazos/cisc879 Lecture 7 How to Read, Critique, Write, and Present a Research Paper

Lecture 7: Overview • Effective and Efficient Reading • Good and Bad Critical Reviewing • How to Write a Paper • How to Present a Paper

Disclaimer • Not easy way to read, write, critique and present! • Practice, practice, practice • Study good examples • Ask advisor for examples of reviews • Read award papers • Example: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/best_papers.html • Attend/watch talks by good speakers • Videos available on internet • Example: http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/

What do I mean by “Read?” • Effective and efficient reading • Do not waste time on irrelevant papers • Maximize your time on relevant papers • The Whys, Whats, and Hows of Reading • Critical Reading • Essential to writing good critical reviews

Problems with Some Papers • Solving problems not applicable to an actual need • CS has not adopted Scientiﬁc Method • Least Publishable Unit (LPU) • Never clearly contrasting to related work • Hard to Read Scientific Method

Questions to Ask • What are the motivations? • What is solution and how is it evaluated? • What is your analysis of problem, solution, and evaluation? • What are the major results? • Correct, new, clearly presented, worth publishing • What are contributions? • Are there any questions not answered? Reference:http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/wgg/CSE210/howtoread.html

Efficient Reading • Preparation • Quiet place and note-taking material • Read for Breadth • Read title and abstract • Skim intro, headers, tables, graphs, and conclusions • Look for primary contributions • Read in Depth • Challenge arguments, assumptions, evaluations, and conclusions • Fallacy: Must read from beginning to end Reference:www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/netbib/efficientReading.pdf

Anatomy of Good Review • Summary of main points of paper (3 to 5 sentences) • Evaluation with regard to validity and significance • Evaluation quality of work • Overall recommendation and thorough justification Evaluation of novelty, significance, correctness, readability. Reference: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/notes/reviewing-smith.pdf

Bad Critical Reviewing • Seek to find all flaws • Criticize paper in a negative way • Use words like “Idiot” and “Trash” • Criticize paper with little comment • After all, they know it’s bad • Criticize/praise all papers • Be known as person that is overly harsh/praising everything! Reference:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/notes/reviewing.html

Good Critical Reviewing • Can Always be Positive • Think face-to-face constructive criticism • Consider Recently-Published New Directions • Explain your Decision • No explanation will carry little weight • Decide which paper is best • Not which paper least worthy of rejection Reference:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/notes/reviewing.html

Bad Review Example This paper is concerned with blah blah blah. The authors develop a method to automatically generate blah blah blah. The solution is based on genetic algorithms and evolution-based methodology. This is a solid paper with respect to methodology and the experiments performed. My score is relatively low because I am not particularly excited by genetic, evolutionary algorithms. Not a Reasonable Justification!

Good Review Example Starts positive, then suggests how to “substantially improve paper.” I like this work a lot. There are two things that would substantially improve it: 1) Investigation of the reasons why blah blah blah. Is there room for more improvement here, perhaps combining the two in some way? If not, what does this say about what technique we should apply, if forced to choose? 2) Quantitative evaluation of the predictive power of blah blah blah. You seem to have a lot of the necessary data (ie, you can compare the results of blah blah blah from Fig 1). Reviewer justifies remark!

Getting a Paper Accepted • Follow the Rules! • paper format, length, on time, etc. • Spell and Grammar Check • Write, Read, Edit, Repeat (many times!) • Have colleagues review • After-the-fact outline (check flow of paper) • Read good papers • Ask advisor and your teachers for good papers • Seminal papers

Getting a Paper Accepted • Important: Write to the reader • What does the reader know and what do they expect next? • Quality must be recognized quickly • What are contributions? • Is paper stimulating? • Is paper relevant? • Have a planned organization of paper • Enough details to reproduce experiments

Anatomy of a Good Paper • Abstract (4-8 sentences) • State the problem and why its important • Briefly describe solution • Implication of solution • Introduction (10% of paper) • Describe problem • State your contributions (bulleted list) • Describe the problem (10%) • Motivate the problem

Anatomy of a Good Paper • Describe your idea (20%) • Convince reader idea can solve problem • Implementation details • The details (45%) • Convince reader you solved problem • State reasonable counterexamples • Related work (10%) • Convince of novelty • Conclusion (5%) • Summary of results and significance of contributions

Icing on the Cake • Attention Grabber Sentence • Great Introduction! • More time editing = less time reading • Convey intuition • One reader has intuition, can follow details • Good looking graphs • Can understand (paper) from reading graph captions • Use Examples!! • Present the general case

Additional Resources • The Elements of Style • By Strunk and White • Style, Toward Clarity and Grace • By Joseph M. Williams • Talks of Research Writing • http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/writing-a-paper-slides.pdf • http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/pl-summer-2007/presentations/session1/william-cook.pdf

What is Your Talk is about • The Paper = The Beef • The Talk = Beef Advertisement • Do not confuse the two! Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.pdf.gz

Your Talk is NOT About: • To impress your audience with your brainpower • To tell them all you know on the topic • To present all the technical details Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.pdf.gz

Your audience • Have never heard of the topic • Just had lunch and ready to nap Your mission is WAKE THEM UP and make them glad you did. Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.pdf.gz

What’s in your Talk • Motivation (20%) • 2 minutes to engage audience • Why should I listen? • What is the problem? • Why is it an interesting solution? • Key Idea (80%) • Be specific • Organize talk around specific goal • Ruthlessly prune everything else! Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.pdf.gz

Tips for a Good Talk • Narrow, deep rather than wide, shallow • Avoid shallow overview talks • Cut to the chase: technical “meat” • Examples are your main weapon! • To motivate talk • To convey intuition • To illustrate key idea Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.pdf.gz

What to leave out • Lots of animation and color • Slides with lots of text • You do not want to read everything that is on your slides, otherwise your audience might wonder why they just don’t just simply read your slides. • You do not want a lot of text on your slides as people will want to read everything you have written and will be distracted from your presentation. Use your slides as a guide. • Technical Detail • Extensive formulas and code • Dense slides will put audience to sleep! • Present specific aspects; refer to paper for details • Related Work • Know it, but don’t elaborate on it Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.pdf.gz

What NOT to Do • Use small fonts • Reveal one point at a time • Do not apologize • “I didn’t have time to prepare the talk” • “I don’t feel properly prepared to give this talk” • Go over your time limit • Stand in front of projected material • Stand with back to audience • Point to laptop Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.pdf.gz

Final Tips • Be Enthusiastic • Practice • Memorize first few sentences • Move around, use arms • Speak to someone at back of room • Identify nodders and speak to them • Watch for questions Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.pdf.gz

How to Read, Critique, Write, and Present a Research Paper