Research Methodology Part VI:
Writing and Publishing Research Papers
Dr. Tarek A. Tutunji
Mechatronics Engineering Department
Philadelphia University - Jordan
Publishing your work
• Communication is an essential part of research. It is as important as the actual derivation, simulation, and experimental work
• Your work will not be considered acceptable research until it is accepted by the research community
• Writing a scientific paper is an act of participation in a research community
• Well-written papers are read and cited while poorly written papers are not
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Publishing in Conference Proceedings
• Publish in well-known and well-organized conferences
• Who is the organizers?
• What is the review process?
• Is the conference specialized?
• Avoid conferences that accept papers only on abstract
• Will the papers be included in IEEE Xplore and/or SCOPUS?
• Look at history (1st or 15th conference)
Conferences publications have less impact than journal publications, but they are easier to publish and provide the
researcher with the opportunity to exchange with other researchers
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Publishing in Journals
• Look for journals that are indexed in
• ISI Web of Knowledge
• SCOPUS
• Avoid Beal’s list
• Consider the Impact factor of the journal
• Consider the mean time for publishing
• Consider the acceptance ratio
Good journals have low acceptance ratio and long publishing time, , but have better impact
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Publishing in Journals
• Writing research and publishing in journals is a learning process
• Start with no-to-difficult journals
• Gain experience and raise your ambition level step-by-step and aim towards publishing in increasingly better journals.
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Before you start
• Ask the following questions:
• What is the message of the paper?
• What is the new result or contribution?
• What information you want to show to the readers?
• What is my target journal and/or conference?
• Write an outline of the paper
• List possible figures and tables that can be included
• Start writing only after you have a logical structure of your paper
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Avoid complex solutions
• Complex solutions are harder to explain well.
• Complex solutions are difficult to reproduce by others.
• Complex solutions are less likely to be cited.
Simplicity is a strength, not a weakness, acknowledge it and claim it as an advantage
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Reproducibility
• Reproducibility is the ability of others to accurately reproduce (replicate) your work
• This includes test, simulation, experiment, and/or method
• Reproducibility is the cornerstone is one of the scientific community
• Reproducible research will help getting your work accepted and cited by others
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Importance of Data
Spend time to obtain real good data
You can use the data for several publications
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Writing Scientific Articles
• Accepting research publications is based on two main issues: • The article substance
• The article readability
An article must have a clear and logical structure
• Authors should clearly define the research problem and its importance in the introduction • This is the main justification for the article
• Writing scientific journal articles is a process learned through writing and publishing attempts when constructive feedback is available.
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Writing Scientific Articles
• A scientific article must answer the following basic questions:
• What is the research problem?
• Why is it important?
• What did others do before?
• What methodology was used?
• What are your results?
• How did you validate the results?
• What are the implications of the results?
• What do you recommend as further study for others?
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The Art of Persuasion
• You must convince the readers of your research work
• Two important issues that can enhance persuasion:
• Structure
• Language
• Your efforts should be guided by:
• Informing the readers about your research in a clear and logical flow
• Convincing the readers of your in-depth knowledge in the field, the correctness of your research procedure, and the validity of your results
A research report can be defined in text-linguistic terms as a persuasive narrative
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The Art of Persuasion
• Do thorough review of relevant literature to demonstrate your knowledge in the field
• Support your claims by references to previous literature
• Present the developed methods in a transparent way to allow others to replicate your work
• Use field, experiment, and/or simulation results test to support your hypothesis
• Compare your results with benchmarking methods
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Writing Style
• Construct a logical and easy-to-follow text that keeps the current topic in the spotlight
• Be clear • The essence of technical writing is communication
• Use simple language and simple construction
• Write with appropriate design • Poor writing lacks order, mixes ideas that should develop
separately, fails to progress in a logical sequence
• Define everything • Define all symbols and abbreviations
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Writing Structure
• Sections are composed of paragraphs
• Paragraphs should have similar lengths
• Link paragraphs appropriately
• Paragraphs are composed of sentences
• Start with good first sentences in all paragraphs
• Link sentences appropriately
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Notes
• Avoid Spelling errors – use a speller ... and pay attention
• Follow the formatting rules of the publication journal or conference proceedings
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Research Paper Structure
1. Title
2. Abstract
3. Introduction and literature review
4. Background theory
5. Methodology
6. Results, analysis, and discussion
7. Conclusions
8. References
Note: Refer to Part III: Thesis Proposal for detailed description of the above sections
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Abstract
• The abstract is the most important part of the paper
• Usually, abstracts are available to all to see and are used for search in library databases.
• Abstract is a concise and direct one-paragraph that describes the contents of the article. It should be an overview of the most important elements of the article: • Objective
• Methodology
• Results
• Conclusion
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Research Results
• Results are used to validate the research work
• Your results should be clear and convincing
• Display the results in Figures and/or Tables
• Discuss your results to support your hypothesis
• How do the results compare with earlier work?
• What is new and significant?
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Visual Elements
• Use visual elements, such as figures and tables, to direct the readers’ attention to key aspects.
• Visual elements should provide the reader with good and professional information as he scans through your paper
• Figures and tables • Must be referred to and discussed in the main text
• Must be numbered
• Must have titles
Your article should be constructed to be so clear that one can get a good level of understanding by browsing through the visual
elements
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Nine reasons papers are rejected
1. Paper is out of scope
2. No contribution
3. Not an interesting problem
4. Too many structure errors and unclear figures
5. Did not compare to benchmark algorithm
6. Did not display and discuss results in a clear manner
7. Too many parameters are used
8. Did not reference other important-related work
9. Did not include references from the journal you are submitting to
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Reviewer’s Work
• Reviewers are busy
• They will first look at
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Figures
• Conclusion
Usually they make decision from first look and spend rest of the time finding reasons to justifying that
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Reviewer’s evaluation
• Reviewers will read the abstract and look for the main contribution
• Reviewers will scan the paper
• Organization is important
• Figures and tables act as an anchor
• Reviewers will soon have an opinion whether the article is good enough
• Reviewers may look to see whether the stated problem/s and research questions are actually answered
• Reviewers will pay attention to your methodology section
• They might study your methods and see if they are justified for your research
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Make the reviewer’s job easy
• The reviewer’s work is voluntary
• They are not paid to think
• If they are forced to think, they may resent being forced to make the effort.
• If you let the reader think, they may think wrong!
With very careful writing, great organization, and self explaining figures, you can reduce the reviewer’s efforts in
understanding and evaluating your work
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React to reviewer comments
• Obtaining critical comments is a good thing, which means that you have a chance for publication
• This is the time for work and analysis
• The feedback may initially seem harsh, however, do not get depressed
• Do provide a point-to-point response acknowledging all the reviewers’ comments indicating all the changes to the article, and justify
Be careful of what you claim.
You might have to prove it in further revisions
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Final Version for Publication
• Review your work before final submission
• Review all the figures
• Review the equations.
• Reviewers might have skipped some of them
It is your work and your name, do careful review before publishing
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Conclusion
• Publishing your research is essential in order to
• Contribute to the research community
• Get your work recognized/accepted by colleagues
• Writing skills and organization is as important as research itself
• You must be able to communicate your work with others
• Target conferences and journals carefully
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Reference
• How to write a research journal article in engineering and science by Scott A. Socolofsky 2004
• How to do good research and get it published in SIGKDD and get it cited by Eamonn Keogh
• Scientific Research Methodologies and Techniques Unit 4 by Luis Camarinho-Matos
• Tips for writing scientific journal articles by Belt, Mottonen, and Harkonen
• How to write a paper by Mike Ashbey 2005
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