Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents

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Writing Scientific Papers

2.0 Index

2.1	Typical Structure of a Scientific Paper
Abstract	This section is key - it's a mini-summary of your paper, intended to allow others to decide whether your work is relevant to their work (and whether they should read on).
Introduction	Overall context of the work, short summary of related work and a presentation of the motivation for the work - the problems that are to be addressed.
Related work	Relatively dry discussion of prior work and how it is inadequate in addressing the problems that your idea addresses.
Contribution	Your idea. This is the topic of the paper. Describe it as clearly as you can.
Evaluation	How do you make sure your idea is a good one? How do you convince others that it's a great idea?
Results	Present the results so that they support the claims made throughout - and support the idea that your idea (the topic of the paper) is worth publication.
Discussion	Optional section - sometimes things that.
Conclusion	This is the conclusion you draw from the work, as presented in the paper. Based on what has been said in this paper, what conclusions can you draw? This is often a semi-summary of the paper.

2.2	Audience: Who will be reading your paper?
Ask before you start your research	This will determine your research context, experimental paradigm and the emphasis or slant you choose for your work. This is especially important if you are working in interdisciplinary research or on projects that can appeal to more than one scientific community.
Ask again before you start writing your paper	Select the journal / conference first Do a background search on papers recently published there, to verify that your background section and description of work fits into their context (less important for journals).