How to Write a Good Research Paper

A practical guide for graduate students

Abhishek Gupta

Associate Professor, ECE | The Ohio State University
Co-Director, IITB-OSU Frontier Center
Founder, Ensemble Control Inc.

Goals of Writing a Research Paper

  • Promote your work — marketing and branding
  • Create generalizable and reproducible knowledge
  • Inform your audience about what is going on in the field and what your contributions are

Side goal

I want someone to read my paper 30 years later.

Elements of a Research Paper

Main body

  • Introduction
  • Problem Formulation
  • Technical Material
  • Conclusion and Future Work

Appendix

  • Proofs
  • Experimental process / details
  • Any other information for recreating the proofs / experiments

One message: Every element has a job. Know what each section must accomplish before you write a word of it.

Know Your Target Audience

Type of paper Audience size Who reads it
Extremely theoretical ~100 people Substantial mathematical training: faculty, math grad students, some industry research labs
Implementation & experimental ~1,000 people Graduate students and industry professionals who do experimental work
Survey ~10,000 people Starting graduate students, interested undergrads, non-experts
News article ~1,000,000 people Non-technical people, CTOs, CEOs, etc.

One message: The audience determines the notation, the pace, and the level of detail — decide who you are writing for before you start.

Goals for Individual Sections

Goals for Introduction

Put the result into perspective

  • Literature survey: A did this, B did that, but we are doing X
  • Our contributions: how are your settings / results different from others?
  • Make use of bullets, tables, and figures for better visualization

Accurately describe the result

  • “Under restricted conditions, our results outperform current state of the art”

Convey the organization of the paper

Convey the Importance of the Problem

If this problem is not solved…

  • X people will die
  • Y cost will be incurred
  • Z risks need to be accounted for
  • A class of people will have a problem (ridesharing passengers will have large waiting times)

If the problem is solved…

  • New revenue-rich capabilities will be unlocked
  • New research directions will be created
  • Existing long-standing open problems are addressed
  • Existing knowledge is generalized via this framework

Also be careful about who this problem is for

General users, telecom companies, data center operators, utility companies, etc.

Goals for Problem Formulation

Select a reasonable notation

  • Not too different from the notation your target audience understands
  • Notation should be picked so the readers can easily follow the arguments

Clearly state the mathematical problem you are solving

Notation hygiene

Use different notation for constants, spaces, sets, operators, etc.

Goals for Conclusion

  • Reinforce the point of view of the paper
  • Qualify the solution approach — X did not work because of A reasons, so we adopted Y approach to solve this
  • State shortcomings of your paper
    • Cite other references that may be studying different problems addressing your shortcomings
  • Identify opportunities to strengthen the contributions through further research — relax assumption A, conduct experiments under low-lighting conditions

Simple Tricks to Make Your Manuscript Readable

Simple Rules for Composition

Strive for: precision · clarity · familiarity · forthrightness · conciseness · fluidity · rhythm

  • The logical structure should be linear or close to linear: A ⟹ B ⟹ C
  • Provide the page number when citing books / long papers
  • Creating suspense is a very bad strategy

Working assumption

Assume the reader cannot recall anything you have written 2 pages prior to the current page.

Split Ideas into Small, Easily Digestible Chunks

  • Multiple short lines are better than one long line
  • Multiple short paragraphs are better than a long paragraph
  • Multiple short results leading to a long result is better than a 20-page proof
  • Two short papers are better than a long paper

One message: The reader’s working memory is small. Package every idea to fit inside it.

Write the Paper Backward

Research vs. writing

Research happens forward in time, but the paper is written with information in hindsight — so you need to write the paper backward from how your own research was conducted.

The dead ends, the failed attempts, the order of discovery — none of that is the reader’s problem. Start from the result, and lay the shortest logical path to it.