16.1: Original

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Classically, a scientific paper follows the following organization:

Abstract
Introduction
Materials & Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusion

The abstract summarizes your paper in a few sentences. What is the problem you want to solve, what is the method you are employing, what are you doing to assess your work, and what is the final outcome.

The introduction should describe the problem that you are solving and why it is important. A good guideline to write a good introduction are the Heilmeier questions:

What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
What’s new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
Who cares?
If you’re successful, what difference will it make?
What are the midterm and final “exams” to check for success?

Originally conceived for proposal writing by the head of DARPA, there are additional questions including “What will it cost?”, “How long will it take?”, and “What are the risks and pay-off”, which are left out for the purpose of writing a research paper. In the context of scientific research, the question “What are you trying to do?” is best answered in the form of a hypothesis, see below.

The materials & matters section describes all the tools that you used to solve your problem, as well as your original contribution, e.g., an algorithm that you came up with. This section is hardly ever labeled as such, but might consist of a series of individual section describing the robotic platform you are using, the software packages, and flowcharts and descriptions on how your system works. Make sure you motivate your design choices using conclusive language or experimental data. Validating these design choices could be your first results.

The results section contains data or proofs on how to solve the problem you addressed or why it cannot be solved. It is important that your data is conclusive! You have to address concerns that your results are just a lucky coincidence. You therefore need to run multiple experiments and/or formally prove the workings of your system either using language or math, see also Section 15.5.

The discussion should address limitations of your approach, the conclusiveness of its results, and general concerns someone who reads your work might have. Put yourself in the role of an external reviewer who seeks to criticize your work. How could you have sabotaged your own experiment? What are the real hurdles that you still need to overcome for your solution to work in practice? Criticizing your own work does not weaken it, it makes it stronger! Not only does it become clear where its limitations are, it is also more clear where other people can step in.

The conclusion should summarize the contribution of your paper. It is a good place to outline potential future work for you and others to do. This future work should not be random stuff that you could possibly think about, but come out of your discussion and the remaining challenges that you describe there. Another way to think about is that the “future work” section of your conclusion summarizes your discussion.

It is important not to mix the different sections up. For example, your result section should exclusively focus on describing your observations and reporting on data, i.e., facts. Don’t conjecture here why things came out as they are. You do this either in your hypothesis — the whole reason you conduct experiments in the first place — or in the discussion. Similarly, don’t provide additional results in your discussion section.

Try to make the paper as accessible to as many reader styles and attention spans as possible. While this sounds impossible at first, a good way to address this is to think about multiple avenues a reader might take. For example, the reader should get a pretty comprehensive picture on what you do by just reading the abstract, just reading the introduction, or just reading all the figure captions. (Think about other avenues, every one you address makes your paper stronger.) It is often possible to provide this experience by adding short sentences that quickly recall the main hypothesis of your work. For example, when describing your robotic platform in the materials section, it does not hurt to introduce the section by something like “In order to show that [the main hypothesis of our work], we selected...”. Similarly, you can try to read through your figure captions if they provide enough information to follow the paper and understand its main results on their own. It’s not a problem to be repetitive in a scientific paper, stressing your one-sentence elevator pitch (or hypothesis, see below) throughout the paper is actually a good thing.