---
# System prepended metadata

title: HowTO Research Paper Guidelines
tags: [research paper, Technical Writing, Writing Research Paper]

---

# HowTO Research Paper Guidelines

###### tags: `research paper` `Writing Research Paper` `Technical Writing`

Surprisingly, the same outline for also works for project planning and presentations

## Problem Statement
* This needs to clearly answer “What”
* Should be easy to understand for a broad audience in the area.
* Clearly outline input/output
* In the paper you will need one figure to clarify this. This would be the “Money Figure” aka Fig 1

## Motivation and Impact
* This should answer the “Why”?
* Why do this. Is there a need or a potential paradigm shift
* And more importantly the “So What"?
* What changes if your proposed solution actually works

## Prior Work and State of the ART
* List key technical challenges of the problem, with how previous work addresses them
* Any other line of work that serves as inspiration for your solution.
* Explicitly state what the SoTA does not do, and what key technical gap remains.

## Our Intuition
* This should answer the “How” question?
* Sometimes this can be included in the Fig 1

## Our Key Contributions
* This is a punchline summary.
If this requires you to explain in nuances, rather than crisp outcome, then it needs work!
## Technical Details
* Describe the approach in detail for comprehension.
* Should mainly try to focus the key technical innovation, which presenting other material for completeness/comprehension.
* Inthe paper you will need 1-2 figures to clarify this. This would be the “method” aka Fig 2 and Fig 3

## Experimental Setup & Metrics
* What is a good setup to evaluate your hypothesis, and what is an independent metric.
* What data, other code, simulation will you use
* In empirical papers this would require figures to illustrate setup. If constrained for space put this figure in appendix but don't omit it

## Experiments
* Your super cool results. With both qualitative and quantitative results

## Making Abstract
And you can take the first 5 points, write a single sentence for each of them, and you got the abstract of the paper.

## Resources
* The original source of this article is from the tweet by Animesh Garg https://twitter.com/animesh_garg/status/1394294886073913353
* How to Write a Great Research Paper from Miscrosoft Reasearch (Video) https://t.co/4t7bI6a0Qe?amp=1
* Presentation Slides - How to Write a Great Research Paper [How to Write a Great Research Paper](http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/%7Esilvia/research-tips/Writing%20a%20paper.pdf)
* Advice on Research and Writing [Advice on Research and Writing]
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mleone/web/how-to.html
* Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5
* Writing a scientific paper, step by painful step Kevin D. Lafferty https://t.co/O2MowdNurd?amp=1
