Template and Guidelines for Writing a Scientific Paper

Christian El Salloum, Wilfried Elmenreich, and Raimund Kirner

Matr.# 9625650, 9226605, 9625030
Kennzahl 881, 881, 881
Institute of Computer Engineering
Vienna University of Technology
{salloum,wil,raimund}@vmars.tuwien.ac.at

March 14, 2006

Abstract — The abstract should concisely summarize the follows:

contents of a paper. Since potential readers should be able to
– Abstract; Kurzfassung, Abstract
make their decision on the personal relevance based on the ab-
stract, the abstract should clearly tell the reader what informa- – Introduction; Einleitung
tion he can expect to find in the paper. The most essential is- – Related Work; Verwandte Arbeiten
sue is the problem statement and the actual contribution of de-
scribed work. The authors should always keep in mind, that the – Basic concepts, Concepts and Terms; Grundbe-
abstract is the most frequently read part of a paper. It should griffe, Grundkonzepte und Definitionen
contain at least 70 and at most 120 words. – Experimental setup, Applied Method; Versuchsauf-
bau, Vorgangsweise
1 I NTRODUCTION – Results; (Experimentielle) Ergebnisse
This document serves two purposes. First it is a template – Discussion, Proof; Diskussion, Beweis
and example for a scientific paper. Second, the text in – Conclusion (and Outlook), Summary; Schlussfol-
the sections contains useful information on structuring gerungen, Fazit; Zusammenfassung (und Ausblick)
and writing your first paper. We recommend to read the – References; Literaturverzeichnis
following sections carefully in order to avoid common
mistakes. The colons separate possible variants in naming the
The introduction should consist of three parts (as para- sections. The variants after the semicolon give the Ger-
graphs, not to be structured into multiple headings): man counterparts. If some text is in brackets, this text
could be optionally added to the given variant (but used
The first part deals with the background of the work
without brackets).
and describes the field of research. It should also elabo-
The section on related work might also appear right
rate on the general problem statement and the relevance?
before the concluding section.
The second part should describe the focus of the pa-
The section on basic concepts should introduce the ba-
per, typically the paragraph starts with a phrase like “The
sic terms and concepts that are needed to understand the
objective of this paper is ...”.
following sections of the paper. Sometimes, it is not nec-
The last part should describe the structure of the paper,
essary to have a separate section on basic concepts, if the
for example: The paper is structured as follows: Sec-
basic concepts are well-known or can be covered in the
tion 2 explains the overall structure for different types of
introduction.
scientific papers. Section 3 gives some hints on writing
The experimental setup typically describes the used
and covers also acronyms, figures and tables. Section 4
hardware, software, and the implementation. If your im-
gives a recommendation on LATEX and explains how to
plementation has a fancy name, you could also name that
get the necessary tools. Section 5 presents a checklist
section that way (for example KHUFU System Descrip-
of common mistakes to avoid. Section 6 concludes the
tion.
paper.
Most papers you will read for your first paper will
2 S TRUCTURE OF YOUR PAPER likely be such research papers.
2.2 S URVEY PAPERS
2.1 R ESEARCH PAPERS
If you do a literature research comparing some ap-
The structuring of your sections heavily depends on the
proaches, your paper could be possibly structured as fol-
type of your paper. For example if you have done some
lows:
research encompassing an experimental setup and mea-
surements, your paper could be possibly structured as – Abstract; Kurzfassung, Abstract

1
 – Introduction; Einleitung
– Basic concepts, Concepts and Terms; Grundbe-
griffe, Grundkonzepte und Definitionen
– Description of first approach
– Other approach, etc. (one section per approach)
– Comparison and Discussion
– Conclusion, Summary; Schlussfolgerungen, Fazit;
Zusammenfassung
Figure 1: Example figure
The semantic of the list is the same as above. The
comparison will typically cover common features, dif- Code Element name Size in bytes
ferences, advantages, drawbacks. A comparing matrix 0 Status 1
would be nice. 1 Cluster name 1
The paper you will write in this course will most likely 5 Data bytes 4
be such a survey paper. Depending on your special topic 9 Checksum 1
you might decide to split up or to combine some sections.

3 W RITING S TYLE Table 1: Table example

Usually you should not use the first person singular (I)
in your text, write we instead. As a general recommen- 3.3 C ITATIONS AND R EFERENCES
dation, use the first person sparsely, sometimes it can be Whenever you refer to previously published work, you
replaced by a phrase like This work presents.... should set a reference to acknowledge the work you build
upon. For example this is a reference to a bachelor’s the-
3.1 L ANGUAGE
sis [1]. If you literally cite a part of someone else’s work,
If you did not make a special agreement with your men- mark the respective sentence by quotes and italic letters
tor, you may write your paper in English or German lan- and add the page number, where its text can be found:
guage. However please keep in mind, that most literature “An intelligent or smart transducer is the integration
you will have to read for your paper will be in English of an analog or digital sensor or actuator element, a
language anyway. processing unit, and a communication interface. In case
If you use English, you might find the following hint of a sensor, the smart transducer transforms the raw
useful: The indefinite article a is used as an before a sensor signal to a standardized digital representation,
vowel sound - for example an apple, an hour, an unusual checks and calibrates the signal, and transmits this digi-
thing, an FPGA (becourse the acronym is pronouned Ef- tal signal to its users via a standardized communication
Pee-Gee-A), an HIL. Before a consonant sound repre- protocol.” [2, p. 175]
sented by a vowel letter a is usual – for example a one, a Failing to explicitely mark literally cited text is a seri-
unique thing, a historic chance1 . ous offense, belonging to plagiarism.
It is also important to keep the set of published work
3.2 F IGURES AND TABLES of high quality. For example, one problem with arti-
cles published on the internet only is that they are typ-
A figure should always be referenced and explained in ically not reviewed. Thus, if you want to cite sources
the text, for example: Figure 1 shows a gear unit with from the internet, you have to ask your supervisor. In
three wheels. As depicted in the figure, the second gear case you really cite a source from the internet, it is im-
wheel is larger than the other two in order two make the portant to provide beside the url additional information
figure more appealing. about the document, see [3] as an example. As the con-
Tables also should always be referenced and explained tent of sources from the internet tends to be unstable, it is
in the text, for example: Table 1 depicts the byte index important to provide detailed information about the revi-
for various items. Note that the size in byte is always one sion. For example, in Wikipedia you can refer to a spe-
except for code 5. cific revision time of the content: [4].
1 According to Merriam Webster, both a and an can be used in writ-
4 U SING LATEX FOR WRITING YOUR PAPER
ing before unstressed or weakly stressed syllables with initial h, thus
you could also write “an historic chance”. LATEX is a type-setting system commonly used in scien-

2
 @BOOK{*, @INPROCEEDINGS{*,
tific publishing. Together with the tool BibteX it supports AUTHOR = {*}, AUTHOR = {*},
you in writing proper articles with correctly formatted ci- editor = {*}, TITLE = {*},
TITLE = {*}, BOOKTITLE = {*},
tations. We recommend also to use LATEX for your paper. PUBLISHER = {*}, YEAR = {*},
LATEX and most tools are freely available. YEAR = {*}, editor = {*},
volume = {*}, volume = {*},
This template can be compiled with the latex com- number = {*}, number = {*},
mand or the pdflatex command. While latex cre- series = {*}, series = {*},
address = {*}, pages = {*},
ates an intermediate file format (.dvi) that can be further edition = {*}, address = {*},
processed into a .ps or .pdf file, the pdflatex com- month = {*}, month = {*},
note = {*} organization = {*},
mand directly creates a .pdf file. } publisher = {*},
note = {*}
Note that with latex the \includegraphics @ARTICLE{*, }
accepts only .eps files, while with pdflatex AUTHOR = {*},
TITLE = {*}, @MASTERSTHESIS{*,
accepts .pdf, .png, or .jpg. Luckily, the JOURNAL = {*}, AUTHOR = {*},
file extension can be omitted in order that YEAR = {*}, TITLE = {*},
volume = {*}, SCHOOL = {*},
\includegraphics{pics/example} will look number = {*}, YEAR = {*},
for file with name example.eps in latex mode and pages = {*}, type = {*},
month = {*}, address = {*},
for a file with name example.pdf, example.png, note = {*} month = {*},
or example.jpg in pdflatex mode. If you already } note = {*}
}
have an .eps file, you may create a respective .pdf @TECHREPORT{*,
file with the commandline conversion tool epstopdf. AUTHOR = {*}, @PHDTHESIS{*,
TITLE = {*}, AUTHOR = {*},
INSTITUTION = {*}, TITLE = {*},
4.1 LATEX T UTORIALS YEAR = {*}, SCHOOL = {*},
type = {*}, YEAR = {*},
We will not give an introduction to LATEX here, since number = {*}, type = {*},
address = {*}, address = {*},
there exist already a number of fine introductions into month = {*}, month = {*},
the subject. note = {*} note = {*}
} }
A good concise introduction is given by [5]. If you are
looking for a manual in German language, refer to [3, 6].
Table 2: Common Bibtex Templates
4.2 ACRONYMS

Explain acronyms at their first occurrence in the text. In

4.4 R ECOMMENDED LATEX S OFTWARE FOR W IN -
order to achieve this consistently, we recommend to use
DOWS
the acronym package.
A new acronym is then declared by writing We recommend MikTeX, which is a an up-to-date im-
\newacro{acronym}{expanded name}. Use plementation of TEX and LATEX for all current variants of
the macro \ac{acronym} as a placeholder for the Windows on x86 systems. MikTeX is freely available at
acronym in the text. See file acronym.tex for further http://www.miktex.org.
examples and explanations. As an editor, we recommend the free TeXnicCen-
ter (available at http://www.toolscenter.org).
4.3 R EFERENCES WITH B IBTEX Both, MikTeX and TeXnicCenter are published under the
Bibtex is an additional program to LATEX that creates a list Gnu Public License (GPL). TeXnicCenter comes with
of your cited references in a chapter named Bibliography. an integrated spell checker, otherwise you are recom-
Bibtex works with a textfile databases of references in so- mended to install the Windows version of aspell, an
called bibfiles (file extension .bib). open source spell checker under the GPL is available at
The bibfiles contain entries of several types, the most http://aspell.net/win32/.
needed types are book, inproceedings, article, Alternatively, you can use Cygwin, which provides
techreport, mastersthesis, and phdthesis. you a Unix-like working environment for Windows.
Table 2 lists templates for these types, whereas each as- Cygwin is freely available under the GPL at http:
terisk (*) should be replaced by the respective data, if //www.cygwin.com. Cygwin also allows you to use
this data is not available, the whole line should be re- the software packages described in Section 4.5.
moved. The case of the element names does not matter 4.5 R ECOMMENDED LATEX S OFTWARE FOR L INUX
to Bibtex, however in the examples we have used UP- AND BSD S
PERCASE for the obligatory fields and lowercase for the
optional fields. To see some examples, have a look into The standard distributions for Linux already come with a
the file bibfile.bib. For more information, read [7]. LATEX system (typically tetex).

3
 As an editor, we recommend the Kile editor (avail- – You mainly used websites and other unrefereed ma-
able at http://kile.sourceforge.net/ under terial as your sources
GPL). As spell checker we recommend aspell, an – You cite some in your conclusion which you have
open source spell checker that replaces the older ispell not mentioned before
checker. aspell is included in most distributions, other-
wise it can be downloaded from http://www.gnu. – Some forenames in the references are abbreviated,
org/software/aspell/. some not
– Some references miss a publishing date
4.6 R ECOMMENDED LATEX S OFTWARE FOR A PPLE
M AC OS X 6 C ONCLUSION
The darwin ports (http://darwinports. The conclusion should briefly summarize the problem
opendarwin.org/) provide a port of teTeX that statement and the general content of the work and the
can be installed under Apple Mac OS X. emphasize on the main contribution of the work.
As an editor, we recommend TeXShop (available at When writing the conclusion keep in mind that some
http://www.uoregon.edu/∼koch/texshop/ readers may not have gone through the whole paper, but
under GPL). As spell and grammar checker we rec- have jumped directly to the conclusion after having read
ommend Excalibur (http://www.eg.bucknell. the abstract in order the decide on the personal relevance
edu/∼excalibr/). of the paper. Therefore, the conclusion should be self-
contained, which means that a reader should be able to
5 C OMMON M ISTAKES TO AVOID understand the essence of the conclusion without having
The following checklist should help in avoiding some to read the whole paper.
frequently made mistakes, if any of the following propo- The conclusion typically ends with an outlook that de-
sitions apply for your paper, there is a problem: scribes possible extensions of the presented approaches
and of planned future work.
– Your abstract has a heading enummeration
R EFERENCES
– You have citations in your abstract
[1] H. Kraut. Signalverarbeitung mittels eines Neu-
– The introduction does not cover the three parts as
ronalen Netzwerkes für einen Smart Sensor. Bache-
described above
lor’s thesis, Technische Universität Wien, Institut für
– The introduction contains subheadings Technische Informatik, 2003.
– You refer to chapters instead of sections (chapters [2] W. Elmenreich and S. Pitzek. Smart transducers –
is only for books or theses) principles, communications, and configuration. In
Elmenreich, Machado, and Rudas, editors, Intelli-
– You described different aspects than promised in gent Systems at the Service of Mankind, volume II,
the title. For example your paper is on modular ro- pages 175–186. Ubooks, December 2005.
botics and you elaborate on robot control.
[3] M. Jürgens. LaTeX - eine Enführung und ein
– You described different aspects for the compared bißchen mehr... FernUniversität Hagen, 2000.
approaches. For example you elaborate on commu- available at http://www.fernuni-hagen.
nication speed for system A, then you write about de/URZ/urzbib/ls broschueren.html.
the code size of system B (better: describe both as- [4] Wikipedia. Worst-case execution time. Online
pects for all three systems) encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/
– You copied some parts of the text from other work wiki/Worst case execution time, 2005.
without proper referencing and citing revision 7:18, October 18th.
[5] T. Oetiker, H. Partl, I. Hyna, and E. Schlegl.
– You used automatic translation tools to produce text
The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX 2ε or
by translating it from another language
LATEX 2ε in 133 minutes, 2005. available at
– Your paper contains many typos and grammatical http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/
errors (Use an electronic spellchecker. Please!) info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf.
– You work in a team and did not spend time for read- [6] M. Jürgens. LaTeX - Fortgeschrittene Anwen-
ing and integrating the parts of the teammembers. dungen. FernUniversität Hagen, 1995. avail-
able at http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/
– You used color in your figures and refer to the URZ/urzbib/ls broschueren.html.
“blue” line (assume that your readers use a mono- [7] O. Patashnik. BibTeXing, 1988.
chrome printer)