Review of the Literature Search

1. Seminar „Ausgewählte Beiträgezum Software Engineering“Part II: Outline/Paper/LaTeXChristopher OezbekFreie Universität Berlin, Institut für Informatikhttp://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-se/ Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de1

2. Review of the Literature Search • Share your experiences! • What worked, what didn't? • Where was progress easy and where was it hard? • Which tips were useful and which useless? • What would you do differently? • How much time did you invest? • Comments in general? Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de2

3. Review of the Summaries you have written • Most of you did an okay job • Still a lot of room for improvement • All the typical mistakes present • Please be aware that these mistakes will not be tolerated in your final version Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de3

4. Common Mistakes when writing a paper • No clear train of thought • No connections • No separations • No concept • Too complicated sentences • Lack of citations • Proof missing • Plagiarism • Usage of imprecise words and fillers • Spelling and commas • Mixing up English and German Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de4

5. No train of thought - No Connections • Train of though is the single most important property of a paper. • Without it people will not be able to follow you. • To achieve this make sure that you connect sentences and paragraphs using an explicit structure or connector words. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de5

6. No train of thought - No Separations • The converse of the above • Sentences need to be separated using paragraphs, enumerations or separator-words (like "Next", "On the contrary", "Afterwards"), otherwise they can be very confusing to read. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de6

7. No concept • This is most important for the talk but also has implications for the paper. • Make sure that you have a structure in your explanations • There should be healthy mix of theory and examples. • If you forget the examples then the paper is to abstract. • If you forgo the theory your paper lacks depth. • Combine complicated material and easy summeries. • Not everybody can follow your explanations. Provide backup routes and key-frames to reset from. • Concept and train of thought are the same issue on different levels. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de7

8. Too complicated sentences • Watch out for sentences that are nested too deep. • You should read over them several times and detangle them. • Suggestion: Im ersten Teil des Textes werden Terminologie und folgende Gliederung für empirische Untersuchungen nach Fenton und Pfleeger (1997) vorgestellt: ... Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de8

9. Lack of Citation - Plagiarism • If you quote passages from other publications, then you need to mark them using quotes and a link into your reference section. • Same holds for ideas (even if you paraphrase them). • If you copy text from other authors without citing them, you risk losing your reputation as a scientist (and your certificate in this seminar). Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de9

10. Lack of Citation - Proof missing • It is easy to jump to conclusions that you cannot back up with a logical argumentation or experimental results. • Be aware that experienced readers will not tolerate remarks that don't stand on solid grounds. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de10

11. Wrong use of Citation • Don't overdo the use of literal citations. • Just copying the words of important authors does not make the paper valuable. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de11

12. Use of imprecise words and fillers • Make sure that words like "maybe", "probably", "for sure", "certainly", don't weaken your argumentation. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de12

13. Spelling and Commas • Use a spellchecker (!) • Review your comma-knowledge. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de13

14. Mixing up English and German • Use the following rule when adding English terms to a German paper. • All terms should be used in German unless no appropriate German translation can be found (P2P). • On the first occurrence you should list the English term in parenthesis. • If you have to have the English term => italics. • Watch out that you don't translate to literally from English. There are a lot of "False Friends" out there. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de14

15. LaTeX and Under- and Overfullboxes • To help LaTeX with splitting words on line boundaries you have to add "\-" into words that are not in the dictionary at all positions where the word could be split. • This gives hints to the LaTeX compiler where split. • For instance: Ver\-ständ\-nis\-feh\-ler Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de15

16. Here the same points with a positive spin • Make sure that your paper has... • Good structure • Clear train of thought • Good understandability • Good readability • Clean Layout • Illustrating Examples and Pictures • Correct Spelling and Grammar • Logical sound argumentations and citations to back them up Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de16

17. LaTeX - Why? • We want to use LaTeX for all the documents produced. This has several reasons: • LaTeX is the standard for scientific documents. • You should have come in contact with this system so that you can contrast it to What You See Is What You Get solutions like Word. • It is easy to enforce a unified look and feel for a set of documents produced by different authors. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de17

18. LaTeX - How? • What you should do (Windows instructions): • Install Miktex - A windows distribution for LaTeX. • Install TeXnicCenter - A powerful editor for LaTeX sources. • Get the template LaTeX files from the Paper-Template.zip. • It contains a little demonstration LaTeX file that has a lot of the important features that you will need to write your paper. • The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2 • Lyx - Is an editor for LaTeX that is kind of a hybrid between LaTeX and Word. Lyx tries to display what it thinks LaTeX will produce, but uses LaTeX in the background. It works mainly on Linux. • TeXmacs - GNU TeXmacs is a free scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU Emacs. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de18

19. Outline • The outline should present the vision of what you would like to present from the topic and structure it in a way that can be followed by the reader. • Ask yourself the question: "Which three things do I want people to remember from my talk?" • The general structure of a paper is the following: • Introduction - Open the topic, place it inside the context of the seminar, motivation • Fundamentals / Definitions - Explains requirements that are necessary for understanding. • - n. Main aspects to be discussed • = n+1. Conclusion, criticism, look-ahead (i.e. where to do research), review of used papers. Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de19

20. Assignment (II) • Create an outline for your topic. • Make an appointment with me before the next session (11.07.05). • We will discuss the outline. • Fill gaps in your conceptual understanding and find rationals/papers for missing logical links. • References • Markus Kalb, 2004. Anforderungen und Tipps. • Hinweise zur Bearbeitung eines Seminarthemas (RWTH Aachen) Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de20

21. Thank you! Christopher Oezbek, oezbek@inf.fu-berlin.de21