Academic Writing

In this blog, I would like to talk about my summary about how to write a good paper or rebuttal in academia.

Paper Writing

• Determining the big picture:
  • Build the scaffolding before filling in the details. Write sections and topic setences first.
    • Start at a high level by outlining sections.
  • Assess balance and budget pages accordingly.
  • Follow the convention from other research papers like the paper structure.
  • Signpost your paper.
    • Examples of signposts include: an outline of the paper at the end of the introduction (“The rest of this paper proceeds as follows.”), a preamble to each section (“In this section, we discuss…”), declarative subsection titles, and (within reason) bold paragraph headings (such as those in this blog post).
• Use figures and plots to support your text:
  • Keep figures as clean and simple as possible.
    1. Lines should not cross one another.
    2. Fonts should be roughly the same size as the font size in the paper itself.
    3. The use of ink should be minimized (no unnecessary shading, backgrounds or colors)
  • Each plot should have exactly one technical point.
    • Using different colors to show different methods when comparing them.
• Make a good impression:
  • Spend a lot of time on your introduction: start early.
    • The introduction summarizes the story of your paper.
  • Write the introduction first and last.
    • Early to think about the following questions in the first round of introduction:
      • What is the problem?
      • Why is it hard?
      • Why will the solution be interesting to readers if it is achieved?
    • Check each claim in the introduction is supported by the results and data in the second round.
  • Perform some “landscaping” on your paper.
    • Place (and create) signposts, figures, and graphs to create whitespace and avoid “walls of text”.
    • Check your spelling.
    • Make the last page look decent.
    • Eliminate widows and dangling text.
      • widows on paragraphs: paragraphs that end with a single word on the last line.
• Be efficient:
  • Tailor the length of your paper to the information content.
    • Remember the goal is to efficiently transfer information.
  • Keep words simple and sentences short.
    • Omit needless words.
  • Eliminate redundancy.
  • Be as specific and precise as you can.
  • Use clear and consistent terminology.

Some questions that the reviewers care:

1. What is the main novelty?
2. How is the method proposed in the paper compared to existing works?
3. Compared with esisting works, what aspect does the paper improve on?
4. How does your method fundamentally differ from other methods?
5. What specific components of the method cause the improvement?

Tips:

1. Write the related work section as an story.

Rebuttal

Some useful sequences:

Opening

• Thank you for your suggestion.
• Thank you for the positive/detailed/constructive comments.
• We sincerely thank all reviewers and ACs for their time and efforts. Below please find the responses to some specific comments.
• We thank the reviewers for their useful comments. The common questions are first answered, then we clarify questions from every individual review.
• We thank the useful suggestions from the reviewers. Some important or common questions are first addressed, followed by answers to individual reviews.

Agree

• We thank the reviewer for pointing out this issue.
• We agree with you and have incorporated this suggestion throughout our paper.
• We have reflected this comment by …
• We can/will add/compare/revise/correct … in our revised manuscript/our final version.
• Due to the rebuttal policy, “authors should not include new experimental results in the rebuttal”, additional results may not be included. However, we will add these mentioned experiments and discussions in our final version. Thank you for the constructive comment.

Disagree

• We respectfully disagree with Reviewer #id that …
• The reviewer might have overlooked Table #id …
• We can compare … but it is not quite related to our work …
• We have to emphasize that …
• The reviewer raises an interesting concern. However, our work …
• Thank you for the comment, but we cannot fully agree with the comment. As stated/emphasized …
• You have raised an important point; however, we believe that … would be outside the scope of our paper because …
• This is a valid assessment of …; however, we believe that … would be more appropriate because …

Explain

• We have indeed stated/included/discussed/compared/reported/clarified/elaborated … in our original paper … (cf. Line #id).
• As we stated in Line #id, …
• We have rewritten … to be more in line with your comments. We hope that the edited section clarifies …

Extra Information

• We have included a new figure/table (cf. Figure/Table #id) to further illustrate…
• We have supplemented the xxx section with explanations of …
• Thank you for the comment. We will explore this in future work.

AC Message

• Please note that Assigned Reviewer #id has made some statements that are either against the common-sense in our field or self-contradictory (ironically his/her own confidence rating is “very confident”). blabla
• We want to bring to your attention the very flawed review \#id. This reviewer is self-contradictory, cf. Comment #id1, Comment #id2, and Response #id. blabla
• We would like to raise attention to AC that unfortunately Reviewer #id holds a very biased view towards the contributions of our paper. blabla

Reference:

1. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/431583258
2. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/104298923
3. https://medium.com/great-research/storytelling-101-writing-tips-for-academics-d9eec50eec9