A Formula for Academic Papers: Title and Abstract

There are many ways that people will use the papers you write. Only a few will pick up your paper and read it straight through, from start to finish. More often, your readers will approach the paper with a focus on the specific component that will aide their research. Somebody running a similar study to yours, for example, may want to borrow your methodology or build on a particular finding you present. A person doing a literature search may want to place your paper in the context of other research or use it as a source of additional papers to read. Even those who do end up reading your paper straight through will probably start by scanning the conclusion, figures, and references to decide if the paper is worth the effort. In each of these cases, however, your reader will also read the title and abstract to develop the necessary context. You want to be sure that these form a clear and complete view your work.

A Formula for Academic Papers

 

Academic writing often follows a formula, and for good reason. Formulaic components are time-tested, and matching structural expectations makes it easy for the reader to focus on content. As you develop your own way of presenting your research to an academic audience, you should build on the common formula in your area. The best way to learn this formula is to read a lot and study the successful elements of well-presented papers. Over the next few weeks I will share the basic formula that I use as a starting point for my papers in human-computer interaction and information retrieval, in case it is useful to you.

Common components:

• Title and abstract
• Authors
• Introduction
• Related work
• Methodology
• Findings
• Conclusion

This series of posts is based on a presentation I gave with Holly Rushmeier on Publishing Your Research at Grace Hopper Conference 2013.

The Case for Slow Search

As discussed in a previous post, Web searchers expect search engines to return results instantaneously. To meet these expectations, search engines make many compromises to shave milliseconds off their response time. But it is ironic that a few milliseconds matter so much when over half of our interactions with a search engine involve multiple queries and take minutes or even hours. Just think, for example, of the last time you planned a vacation or researched a potential medical diagnosis. For these tasks, the quality of the experience – and not speed – is what matters.

Search Engines' Quest for Speed

I remember seeing the World Wide Web for the first time in 1994. I had just started college, and was in a dungeon of a computer lab with a friend of mine (who I happened to marry seven years later). He pulled up Lynx, an early text-based browser, and showed me a page of text that physically resided on a remote computer. We could visit the URLs that he knew, read the text available, and tab between the underlined words to navigate to other pages of text – but that was it. The whole experience was all together underwhelming. It wasn’t until I discovered search engines that the Web really seemed to come alive. 

Surprise Success

This is an update to my earlier posts about my eight year old son’s experience writing a 64-page fantasy novel titled The Marakon Ways. We self-published the book as an easy way to share it with friends and family. I guessed we might possibly sell up to 100 copies, but to all of our surprise we have already sold more than twice that! And the book only just became available via Amazon today.

How to Ask Effective Questions

We all ask questions of our social networks. For example, the other day I posted a question to Twitter looking for a hotel recommendation in Dublin for SIGIR 2013. When we ask questions, sometimes we get good answers, and sometimes we get bad answers. But the quality of the answers we get isn't completely random – it is something we, as question askers, can control. This post describes some of the tricks we have learned about how to ask effective questions online from our research.

Making the Marakon Ways

My 8 year old son, Griffin, just published a fantasy novel called The Marakon Ways. I helped him with the publishing, but not the writing. In fact, he didn’t even tell me that he was writing a book until he was a few chapters in! According to his teacher, Matt, at the start of the school year Griffin decided he would write a book and asked for help typing it up. Over the next four months, Griffin dictated his story, watching over his teacher's shoulder to make sure everything came out just the way he wanted it to, and learning a lot about patience and politeness. 

The Marakon Ways

I am very proud of my 8 year old son, Griffin! Over the past seven months he wrote an 8 chapter, 60 page fantasy novel that tells a "clever and engrossing story." From the book's back cover:

Lily and Daniel don't realize, when they first see a wolf in the kangaroo pen at the zoo, that they are about to embark on an amazing adventure. But after the wolf disappears into thin air, the two children quickly discover that things in the real world don't always happen the way that grownups tell them they should. Lily and Daniel become trapped in a vortex that transports them to an unknown world called Wolf Land. There they learn that they must save a strange breed of wolf-people and an entire way of life from Arclos and his five evil sons using an ancient martial art called the Marakon Ways. Written by eight year old Griffin Hehmeyer and illustrated by his classmates, The Marakon Ways is an entertaining fantasy story that appeals directly to the child in all of us.

Child-Friendly Conferences

I feel lucky to be part of an awesome, inclusive community that is flexible and thoughtful about how to help people with different constraints participate and contribute. Everyone wants great researchers to produce great work, so we try to remove the obstacles that get in the way. Following Friday’s post with advice for traveling to conferences with children, several conference organizers have expressed interest in how they might help make it easier for parents to attend. What follows is a list of ideas for supporting parents at conferences, compiled with the help of colleagues*:

Attending a Conference with a Baby

I was just in Paris, attending CHI 2013, and felt a little homesick because none of my children were with me. For over six years, while I was pregnant and nursing, at least one of my four boys came with me to every conference I attended. Griffin, for example, traveled one hundred thousand miles in his first year of life. Below are some things that I found made attending a conference alone with a baby a little easier for me.