This is not an article - just food for thought about how to write it.

Under the cut, the translation of the article by Carsten Sørensen "This is not an article - It tells you what to look for when writing a scientific article. If you are writing a dissertation in the field of information technology, you will surely find something interesting for yourself. However, the authors of popular articles can also find something useful.

The article discusses the main issues that you need to ask yourself when writing a scientific publication. Understand interesting examples of articles. Probably everyone has heard or used the phrase "silver bullet" in relation to a particular technology. But have you ever wondered who first used this metaphor in IT and why is it so popular? The article also deals with an analogy between programmers and watchmakers. Both those, and others in their time stood at the origins of the new technology. With the development of the watch industry, the watchmakers themselves are almost gone. I wonder what awaits programmers in 500 years?

annotation

When we sit alone on research work shortly before (or after) the final deadline for submitting a publication and waging a difficult struggle to finish our latest, newest, and certainly the best article to date, we don’t think much about it. When we send an article to the editors of a journal or to a conference, we also do not think too much about it. But I am sure that most of us think about this when we receive reviews from reviewers or unpleasant questions when presenting work at a conference. Our colleagues are often too polite to tell the bitter truth that the article is wrong, incomplete and controversial.
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The following pages examine the question: how to write a good article that simultaneously documents the complex of research I have done, and also “sells” the statements made in the work? These pages contain some of the basic questions that it would be nice to consider before submitting the first draft of the article. They are based on my own subjective experience of writing articles. My goal is to present some of the basic rules that I learned, and not "the whole story." If you, after reading these pages, try to apply the normative statements that I cite later in this article, you will understand why I decided to call it "This is not an article - just food for thought about how to write it."

1. Introduction

The stereotypical mad scientist looks like an old man (crazy female scientists have not yet met), half-dressed, in a white coat and small glasses, bent over an impressive installation of test tubes, glass lamps, beakers and burners, absorbed by mixing colorful liquids accompanied by alarming sounds reactions. What he does may be research. On the other hand, he can just play with a lot of expensive equipment. If he is not just playing, he will most likely record the results for later analysis. The experiment is likely to be based on a set of hypotheses derived from theoretical judgment and previous empirical data. Moreover, he will most likely document the findings in the form of technical reports, articles, presentations, books, etc. This paper addresses issues related to documenting research results in the form of articles.

Writing scientific articles for me is sometimes a difficult and cumbersome process. On the other hand, it is also sometimes a very useful process. My personal problems or joys, however, do not play a special role. The main functions that I must perform in order to receive a salary are, among other things, the production and documentation of research results. Articles are one of the main tangible results in the field of research of information systems (IS). There are at least two reasons for writing articles: they help you make sense of what you are doing, and also document your results and communicate them to others. This work is dedicated to the latter.

The purpose of this work is to study the question: what are the important aspects that should be considered when documenting the results of research of information systems in scientific articles? I am not saying that these pages can in any way replace the reading of important publications on how to become a good author. This work is just an aperitif and reflects my own, very subjective, ideas about what is good and what is not. Of course, I also admit that writing articles is just one of many ways to document research. Therefore, this paper does not address the specific problems of writing books, technical reports, consultant reports, field research reports, slides for oral presentations, etc.

The underlying assumption underlying this work is that when you are going to write an article, half the work is done when you manage to ask yourself some good and important questions to answer in this article. Specific questions vary from topic to topic, but there may be general issues that must always be considered.

Other authors have written on this and related topics. Robert Day (1977, 1991) wrote an article on how to write articles, as well as a very good book that outlines important aspects of how to write an article and then publish it, plus many other related issues. I am not trying to compete with him or many others listed below. This article can be considered as a quick-start guide or aperitif for further research. Beer (1992) has collected more than 60 short articles providing practical help on a range of issues, from writing the first draft of an article to speeches. I also found a couple of articles on this topic: a relatively short article by Naur (1992); an article containing detailed examples of how to present the results of Gopen and Swan (1990); article Snyder (1991) is aimed at potential OOPSLA participants; Pugh (1991) and Wegman (1986) focus on how to write extended theses. Klein (1989), Krathwohl (1988) and Witten (1990) wrote about how to write sentences. Book Lester Sr. and Jr. (2004), dedicated to writing research papers, is newer than the book of Day, but also less entertaining. However, where she lacks humor, the description is compensated by rich details. Björk and Räisänen (2003) offer a full course of academic writing. Weston (1987) provides a very inspiring basis for building argumentation, and the classic Strunk and White (1979) will teach you most of what is worth knowing about the style in English. The Economist (2003) published an excellent writing style guide, and Truss (2003) wrote a very popular punctuation book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Stephen King (2000) wrote a book about the craft of writing, not in a scientific context, but from the author's point of view. The eight-page “Guide to punctuation, mechanics, and manuscript form” is contained in (Guralnik, 1970), and Cook (1985) provides a working and practical writing guide. Several books offer assistance to novice writers who are engaged in scientific work, for example, the books Dunleavy (2003), Holliday (2001) and Philips & Pugh (2000). Olk & Griffith (2004) discusses how knowledge is created and distributed among scientists. Fuller (2005) mainly considers the difference between researchers and scientists, and Frankfurt goes to a certain extreme in his little philosophical exposition about the bullshit. At MIT, a group of computer science students, perhaps inspired by this work, even wrote a generator that automatically prepares a scientific publication for you ( http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ ).

The views expressed in this article may seem somewhat categorical. This is mainly done in order to focus on their essence, and also because these are my personal views. It is implied that the given normative statements are an ideal to which one should strive, an ideal from which one can deviate a little for pragmatic reasons. I myself, for example, not without effort, try to carry out the principles described. Since I have only a few years of experience in writing articles, I certainly have not learned all the secrets of this skill. Therefore, all suggestions for improvement are very welcome.

This article is structured as a series of lessons that I learned. The next section stipulates that you need a reason to speak out. Section 3 emphasizes the importance of simplicity. Section 4 outlines five basic questions to ask yourself when writing an article. Section 5 proposes to start with imitation, and section 6 states that you should get the right to deviate from the norm. In section 7 we will focus on the process of writing an article. Section 8 focuses on readability, and Section 9 focuses on the relationship between writing and reviewing.

2. You need a good reason for stating your position.

Before you start writing an article, I have to tell you the good and bad news. The bad news is that you have to earn the right to present your position, that is, the right for your article to be accepted. The good news is that taking the commitment to submit an article on time, as soon as you really got a good excuse for expressing your opinion, is a very good way to ensure that your interesting results will be documented and reviewed by experts in your field. Think of articles as pieces of a big puzzle. One of the most important aspects of research is the expansion of the existing body of knowledge, while new knowledge should be related to what was formulated before you. An article is an integral part of this puzzle only if it has been reviewed by experts and published. You, therefore, need a very good excuse to disturb downloaded reviewers with your article.

For the purpose of a small provocation, I will simply list several archetypes of articles, the reading of which I consider a waste of time (see Figure 1).

(This list is inspired by the performance of Jonathan Liebenau at the “Meet the Editors” panel session at the Joint European and American Doctoral Consortium, Copenhagen, Denmark. December 1990.)

The fact is that a good reason for expressing one’s position is a combination of either theoretical or practical work - or both. Section 4 provides some guidance on what types of excuses you may have to express your point of view.

Article about "great idea"	“I just had this great idea! I don’t know if anyone else had the same, because I didn’t check, besides, I’m new to this field. In any case, my idea is brilliant, so I really would like to share it with all of you. "
Article about "other people's ideas"	“I just read this wonderful book, which I really like. I just summarize for you the interesting moments from it. ”
Article "IT hacker"	“I just developed this wonderful program. It is not based on any previous theories or empirical conclusions. Yes, I myself am not really a theoretician, but there are a lot of fantastic functions in the system, and the interface is really beautiful. ”
The article "hacker theorist"	“I came up with this theory, conceptual toolkit, model. They are not related to other theories, conceptual tools, models, or any empirical data. Most of the concepts were defined differently by the luminaries in this area, but I do not like their categories, so I came up with my own. "
Article "with a lot of ideas"	“I have just completed a major research project, where I did a lot of interesting things. I think you could learn a lot by reading this article describing all aspects of my work. ”

Figure 1. Examples of archetypes of articles, the reading of which does not bring me joy.

3. Do not complicate

This section explores the simple idea of ​​not complicating things. If you have something interesting to discuss, there is no reason to shoot your left foot, try to answer too many questions in one article, or shoot your right foot, putting forward too many controversial and unconfirmed statements when answering one question .

Only one idea per article

The type of articles with a variety of ideas mentioned in the previous section leads me to a very important issue when writing an article. The principle of one idea gets its own section, because this principle is very difficult to accomplish when you start writing an article. If your article contains two or more main ideas, you need a very good reason not to break it into two or more articles, each of which represents one main idea. This principle, of course, is easier to state than to fulfill, and in the general case it is impossible to propose a rule according to which this principle can be violated. On the other hand, when I reviewed an article for a magazine or conference, I most often have no doubt when faced with work that suffers from too high a density of ideas.

Put your neck on only one guillotine.

When writing an article, you have the potential advantage of choosing a battlefield — you define a topic that will be discussed further. As mentioned above, this topic should contain one main idea or research question. After you have taken care of this, you must argue your position. Here it is important that you remember the common goal - the argumentation of your main idea. To do this effectively, it is usually not recommended to introduce marginal discussions that are not directly related to your position. If you have one idea that you want to argue, too many unsupported or contradictory statements will inevitably weaken your position - you put your neck on more than one guillotine, and this is not a particularly good idea.

4. Basic questions to ask yourself

When documenting an interesting aspect of your research in an article, there are many questions you can ask yourself. Most of them relate to the topic you are describing. However, there are at least the following five general questions that it is useful to think about: (1) What is the problem area? (2) What is the problem? (3) What is the research approach? (4) What did the others do? and (5) What are the results of the work?

Before we dive into these five questions, let's light them up a bit with an amusing example of how they were answered in the introduction to the article “Ray Tracing for Brand Jell-O Gelatin” (“Ray Tracing Jell-O Brand Gelatin”) (Heckbert , 1987) (Figure 2).

“Ray tracing has established itself in recent years as the most general algorithm for image synthesis [10]. The researchers studied the calculations of the intersection of the rays with the surfaces for a number of surface primitives. These include chess boards [Whitted 80]; chrome balls [Whitted 80]; manipulators [Barr 82]; blue abstract things [Hanrahan 82]; more glass balls [Watterberg 83]; Mandrills [Watterberg 83]; more mandrills [Sweeney 83]; green fractal hills [Kajiya 83]; more glass balls [SEDIC 83]; water shapeless things [Kaw 83]; more chrome balls [Heckbert 83]; billiard balls [Porter 84]; more glass balls [Kajiya 86].

Unfortunately, no one did ray tracing for food. Until now, the classic Blenn orange and strawberry images were the most realistic products, but they were created using a line-scanning algorithm [2]. The “Dessert Realism Project” in Pixar addresses this issue. This article presents a new ray-tracing technology for a limited class of desserts, in particular, Jell-O gelatin. We believe that this method can be applied to other brands of gelatin and, possibly, to pudding.

This article is divided into three parts: the static Jell-O simulation method, the Jell-O motion simulation using impressive mathematics and the calculation of the intersection of the rays with the Jell-O. "

Figure 2. Introduction from the article “Ray tracing for Jell-O brand gelatin” (Heckbert, 1987).

The introduction above, of course, is intended to make the reader giggle or even laugh. However, it provides a concise example of how you can answer five questions. In this section, these issues are discussed in more detail and seriously.

What is the problem area?

In order to focus the attention of the reader and to determine the scope of the research problem discussed in your article, it is a good idea to start with a presentation of the problem area to which you are addressing. Let's look at the example presented in Figure 2. It starts with the following two sentences:

“Ray tracing has established itself in recent years as the most general algorithm for image synthesis [10]. The researchers studied the calculations of the intersection of the rays with the surfaces for a number of surface primitives. ”

Reading this, we learn that these guys love to be engaged in ray tracing. This is a characteristic of the problem area, in contrast to the statements made later in the introduction:

“Unfortunately, no one did ray tracing for food. Until now, the classic Blenn orange and strawberry images were the most realistic products, but they were created using a line-scanning algorithm [2]. The “Dessert Realism Project” in Pixar addresses this issue. ”

Now we have learned that they, in the context of this article, are interested in ray tracing for food. This leads us from describing the problem area to describing the problem.

What is the problem?

It is very important for you to get a clear idea of ​​what research question you want to consider in the article. This is important for several reasons. First, the clearer the understanding you have, the better you can achieve a sufficient depth of your argument. Secondly, when the reader read your article, he should at least link it to one important idea that you argued. As a very good example, consider the Brooks article “There is no silver bullet - the essence and the incidence in software engineering” (Brooks, 1987) (see also Figure 4). When you read this article, you will link it to an idea: no software development technology alone can solve the problem of a crisis in software development. What is simple, but, as can be seen from the number of links to this article, is also a powerful statement. If the reader has a little confusion about the substance of the article, the article will have little effect at best. One of the main criteria for success in writing articles is to get specialists in your field to read and quote your articles. If they do not remember what they have just read, there is little chance that they will use the article or recommend it to others.

What is the research method?

This is one of the places where there is no walking around the bush. One of the factors that distinguishes research from other types of human activity, such as art, innovation, games, etc., is that it is a conscious activity. This means that it is not enough just to present the results; you should also be responsible for your actions. In some areas, this means that any of the specialists in your area should be able to reproduce what you have done and get the same result. In many other areas, this is nothing more than a theoretical possibility. However, you should be as responsible as possible. — , . , , .


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Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (full text)
Common Errors in English
A Handbook for Technical Writers
Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling
Guide to Grammar and Writing
Grammar Help
Guide to Grammar and Style
Ranking of IS Journals
Ranking of IS Journals
IS Journals
IS Journals

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