Chapter 1 Thesis Structure
The organizational structure of papers in different scientific and technological fields is different.
One key point recognized by experts in various professional fields is that the first one and a half to two pages of the paper are the most important, which determines whether the reader is willing to continue reading and is also the basis for reviewers to draw preliminary conclusions.
Before starting, organize the structure of the paper , determine the logical sequence , and then determine the usage of technical terms (that is, what professional vocabulary should be used to express the main technical concepts)
The general principle is that the earlier you think about and determine the use of technical terms, the better. The more you work on this part, the clearer the concept of the paper should be.
1.1 Title, Authors and Affiliations
Try to keep the title as concise as possible, no more than two lines. Every word in the title must be carefully crafted, and the relationship and order between words must be carefully considered and determined. The title should accurately reflect the content of the paper.
The question should not be a complete sentence, that is, there should be no subject or predicate verb, and a gerund should be used where a verb should be used.
The author and the institution try their best to write in accordance with the requirements of the conference or journal . If it is a double-blind review, the author and unit are not required when submitting the manuscript, and any references to your past work must be temporarily deleted. You can leave the author and unit blank and fill them in after acceptance, so as not to affect the format of the article.
signature. The search terms for papers after publication are based on the initials of the name plus the surname. For example, Kang Zhang was abbreviated to K.Zhang. Such abbreviations will result in duplicate names, but the single author has no choice.
For authors with two names, it is recommended to separate the two characters.
Liu Chunhui
Chunhui Liu C.Liu
Chun-Hui Liu CH.Liu
Chun Hui Liu CHLiu
ChunHui Liu CHLiu
1.2 Abstract
The first page and a half of a paper is the most important and is the key to determining the reviewer's assessment of the paper. Pay enough attention to the abstract and introduction.
The abstract mainly summarizes the main content of the paper.
It should be self-contained with no references to literature, figures, tables or diagrams.
Always remember one thing when writing an abstract: readers should be able to determine immediately after reading it whether it is relevant to their interests and whether they need to read the full text.
First, use one or two sentences to introduce why you are doing this research. Then, a concise summary of the methods used should be followed by the most important research results of this paper, described in a summary form, and if necessary, its significance is explained in one sentence. Be sure not to paste detailed results directly from the main body of the paper.
You can write the full text first and then the abstract, which can be targeted . You can also write the abstract first, then the full text, and then update and fine-tune it.
1.3 Keywords
Keywords are also called index terms in some journals . They should be words that appear multiple times in the paper and represent the topic of the article. The meaning cannot be too broad or too narrow.
Keywords should be nouns or gerunds . They are usually used to match the reviewer's professional direction and are also used to search for documents in the database, so they need to accurately cover the scope of the paper.
The most common mistakes made by students who are new to writing papers include: writing keywords as verbs, consisting of too many words, including unusual abbreviations, and words that do not appear in the abstract or introduction.
1.4 Introduction
The introduction mainly needs to make it clear "What was the problem? Why is it important?", that is, what problem this article needs to solve , why this problem is important , and the purpose of writing this article . Sufficient background information should be provided here so that the reader can understand and evaluate the results of this article without looking at the literature cited in this section.
The documents cited in the introduction must be carefully selected, they must be the most important background documents , and the sources must be authoritative . Don't just look for a few related background papers or books, and don't cite many documents at the same time and summarize them in one sentence. This will give readers the suspicion of citing for citation's sake . The citation of specific documents should be directly related to the content mentioned . It is best to distinguish the focus of the documents to be cited and cite them in different sentences according to their focus .
What is the motivation for writing this article? A more effective way of writing is to give a motivating example at the beginning of the introduction to explain why the solution discussed in this article is needed.
The most important results and conclusions may repeat the content of the abstract paper , but it is best to use different sentences to describe it , rather than copying it directly from the abstract. If the introduction is written first, do not copy it directly into the abstract. Before the end of the introduction, it is best to list the contributions of this article in the form of 2-3 bullet points . Describe each contribution accurately in one or two sentences. No more than four contributions are recommended.
The last paragraph of the introduction is mostly a brief summary of the arrangement of the following chapters.
To summarize the mistakes to avoid in the introduction:
-
Too short and not clear at all;
-
Talking in general terms and lacking specificity;
-
No research motivation;
-
Deny previous work;
-
Documents are missing or cited inappropriately;
-
Contributions are not summarized;
1.5 Methodology
This is the main part of the paper, the specific way to write the article.
No matter how you write it, the order of these chapters must be logical, usually from big concepts to small details, big framework to final implementation. Never write it the other way around.
In many fields of technology and engineering, mathematical modeling is essential. If you can use mathematics to describe the problem, try to use mathematics as much as possible , which is not only accurate but also concise. Only write definitions and corresponding theorems for concepts that need to be used in the paper.
The best way is to find one or two similar papers in top journals for reference, which use similar research methods, similar research processes or similar directions and imitate their methods.
The general principle is to try to write the most essential technical contributions at the front of this part.
1.6 Results
The research results section answers the question "What did you find?"
This is the main basis for judging the contribution of a paper, and it is also the most important basis for deciding whether the paper is accepted. Therefore, it must be written clearly . The final results must be written out and each data explained in detail, such as how it was obtained and under what conditions. restrictions, what is their significance, etc.
All results should not only display data, charts, screenshots, etc., but must analyze, explain and infer these results in detail realistically, but should not exaggerate their significance (claims), nor add random additions that have no basis or have no connection with previous work. Comparative self-comments of the work , such as "these results are indeed significant", reviewers are most disgusted with such statements.
1.7 Related Work
This section is a must! In computer science, computer engineering, information science, and some related fields, papers without this section will most likely be rejected outright. Some authors believe that related work can be placed in the introduction, but this idea is wrong. As mentioned above, the literature references of related work in the introduction are to introduce the background and the necessity of doing this work . In other fields, related work is placed in the introduction and discussion sections, not as a separate section.
The related work section should list all previous work that is closely related to the work of this article, and compare them one by one to explain their similarities and differences with this work, or their shortcomings or failure to solve the problems required by this article . The purpose of writing this way is to highlight the necessity of this work.
It should be noted not to overemphasize the importance and innovativeness of this work . Incremental work is also worthy of publication.
The related work section can be placed after the introduction, that is, the second section, or it can be placed in the penultimate section, that is, before the conclusion (Conclusions). The difference between these two places is that the former assumes that the reader has not yet read the work and specific methods of this article, while the latter is after the main paper. The reader already knows the method of this article and has a rough understanding of the difference between it and related work, so this part The differences can be written in more detail and to the point.
1.8 Conclusions and Future Work
This section summarizes the key points and important conclusions stated in this article , as well as the limitations .
This last section might as well discuss some potentially controversial arguments and state the author's own views for readers to discuss further.
In addition, some reviewers hope to see the author's self-criticism and point out the shortcomings of the work . Don't be afraid to describe shortcomings. No perfect study will always lack something. Including the scope of application of this work, the amount of data, the limitations of conclusions, the scope of methods used, etc., these may become shortcomings and require further improvement, expansion, verification or more in-depth and detailed research. This is the perfect link for future work.
Future work is mainly to continue to conduct further in-depth research on the basis and direction of this article's research , improve methods, add data or expand the scope of application, etc. Some areas are designed to make up for the shortcomings mentioned above. As for the general direction of future research , it does not need to be too specific, just mention it generally.
1.9 Acknowledgments
The acknowledgments section usually includes thanks to people who have made some contributions to this article but are not enough to be authors, including the groups who participated in the trial, the auxiliary personnel who helped collect the data, the researchers who helped read and provide comments, and the units or departments that provided the experimental equipment. wait.
After the first review of the paper, you can also thank the anonymous reviewers and express your gratitude for their pertinent and insightful comments.
The acknowledgment section is usually a place to thank the funding unit. It is best to use "partial support", because in most cases, the author is not able to write the paper with such financial support.
1.10 References
At the end of the paper is a literature list. Depending on the requirements of different journals or conferences, there are two possible arrangements, namely alphabetic order and citation order. Unless the journal you are submitting to explicitly requires citation order, it is recommended to use alphabetic order. When updating the document list, such as inserting new documents or deleting, it will be more convenient than using citation order.
Try to use the latest literature and the most authoritative journals or conference papers, or the most classic books. If you are elaborating on a method, theory or algorithm that was first mentioned, you need to use the earliest published document.
How the literature list is written can tell whether the author is meticulous and rigorous, which is specifically reflected in the completeness and consistency of the way each document is written. Here "completeness" means that all the following information must be written completely, and "consistency" means that the following items must be written in the same way in each document and should not be written in different ways.
-
The order between the author's first name (or abbreviation, initials) and last name (in the following example, the first name comes after the last name), be sure not to mistake the first and last names. Only the first name can be abbreviated to a single letter. Separate multiple authors with commas. No matter how many authors there are, they need to be listed and cannot be omitted with "et al." When cited in the article content, the citation of three or more authors' documents can be "Lastname1, Lastname2, et al. 2019";
-
Whether the question is enclosed in quotation marks (in the following example, there are no quotation marks), the first letter of each word must be capitalized, rather than all letters being capitalized;
-
Is the name of the journal, or the name of the conference proceedings, abbreviated (examples of full names and abbreviations are listed below, in italics);
-
The volume (Volume or Vol.), number (Numbei or No.) of the journal, and the location of the conference;
-
Journal or conference proceedings publisher;
-
Journal publication date or conference date;
-
Page number, whether to write "pp." in front or write the page number directly (in the example below, there is no pp.)
Different publications (conference proceedings or journals) have different requirements for the writing order of the last three items above, and there will be some differences.
Journal examples:
-
C.Y.Zhao,J.Kong,and K.Zhang,Program Behavior Discovery and Verification:A Graph Grammar Approach,IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol.36,No.3,May/June 2010,431-448.
Example of meeting minutes:
-
Z.B.Fan,Y.N.Li,J.H.Yu,K.Zhang,Visual Complexity of Chinese Ink Paintings,Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception(SAP'2017)，Cottbus,Germany,16-17 September 2017,ACM Press,9:1-9:8
Different publications have different requirements for how to write documents, such as APA format (https://apastyle.apa.org), which writes the year after the author's name and before the title; the surname is before initials:
-
Zhao C.Y,Kong J.,Zhang K.(2010) Program Behavior Discovery and Verification:A Graph Grammar Approach,IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol.36,No.3,431-448.
Some publications also require abbreviation of the journal name, volume number and page number to save space:
-
C.Y.Zhao,J.Kong,and K.Zhang,Program Behavior Discovery and Verification:A Graph Grammar Approach,IEEE Trans. On Software Eng., 36:431-448,2010.
In addition, when writing references, do not add [J], [C], etc. after the title of the paper. Foreign literature does not have this habit and non-Chinese people will not understand it.
1.11 Appendix (Appendix)
Most journal articles can have appendices . Conference papers usually have a page limit, so it is not appropriate to use appendices to replace the space required for the main text. In other words, it is better to occupy the limited space with useful main text rather than waste time with dispensable appendices.
According to the typesetting order, it should be placed after the reference list (References). Appendices generally contain auxiliary materials as support or supplement, such as longer theorem proofs or questionnaires used in usability tests. Theoretically, the review of the paper will not be affected by the appendix; in practice it is difficult to say, but it may increase the reviewer's confidence in the evaluation of the paper.