How to write a great research paper
Here are some pointers to other useful advice:
- You and your research (opens in new tab), Hamming’s famous 1986 talk on how to do great research.
- The Navigators Research Book of Style (opens in new tab) is a slide deck from the Navigators research group at the University of Lisbon. It covers choosing a research topic, doing research, and writing and submitting a paper.
- Research tips (opens in new tab) (including how to do research, how to write and present a paper, how to design a poster, how to review, etc), by Sylvia Miksch (opens in new tab)
- Notes on presenting theses (opens in new tab), edited by Aaron Sloman, gives useful guidelines and ideas for PhD students writing their thesis.
- Chris O’Leary’s essays about writing an “elevator pitch” (opens in new tab). This stuff, especially the list of attributes in the “Elevator pitch 101” page, is very relevant to writing a good grant proposal.
- Guide for preparation and publication of abstracts (opens in new tab) and A scrutiny of the abstract (opens in new tab), both by Kenneth Landes in Geological Notes. These short notes give guidance about writing the abstract of your paper.
- Norman Ramsey’s notes about his class on Technical Writing (opens in new tab).
- Mathematical Writing (opens in new tab), by Donald E. Knuth et al. The first three sections constitute a minicourse on technical writing: only eight pages long. The time to read it will repay itself many times over.
- How to Write Mathematics (opens in new tab), by PR Halmos.
- Gian-Carlo Rota’s excellent talk Ten lessons I wish I had been taught (opens in new tab), which, among other things, has a bit to say about giving a talk.
- David Patterson’s talk How to have a bad career in research/academia (opens in new tab) has many wise things to say on a related topic.
- Mark Leone’s page (opens in new tab) has a good collection of links to other resources.
- Papers about measurement:
- Producing wrong data without doing anything obviously wrong! (opens in new tab) Mytkowicz, Diwan, Hauswirth and Sweeney, ASPLOS 2009.
- How not to lie with statistics – the correct way to summarise benchmark results (opens in new tab) Fleming & Wallace, CACM 29(3), pp218-221, March 1986.
- Derek Dreyer’s excellent PLMW’16 talk “How to write papers so that people can read them” (slides here (opens in new tab), video here) (opens in new tab) tackles exactly the same question as my talk, and also offers seven concrete suggestions — and they are interestingly different from mine!
- The blog post (opens in new tab) by Igor Pak on ‘How to write math papers clearly’ is also useful.