How to Write to be Published

Ian Witten

The Publication Game

Why publish?

  1. Don't. The market is flooded!
  2. Bad reason. To have a long pubs. list
    Quality vs quantity: Quality counts!
  3. Good reason. You've done something you're excited about and want to communicate it to others.
  4. The question of reputation.
  5. But if you don't publish, don't bother to do research.

Where should I publish?

Choosing a J./Conf- look for calls for papers
info for authors

How to get rich by writing books

"No man except a blockhead ever wrote except for money"
- Samuel Johnson April 5, 1776

1 book = 1 MByte of text

=1000 hours (40 hr/week x 6 months)

Sell for US$40 2000 copies

x12% =~US$1900 ($1900 p.a. over 5 years)
=$9.50/hour

cf medium grade hooker: $100/hour

so... go for 10,000 copies (royalties very non-linear) ~$100/hour

How to get published

Write an influential paper by:
Forschen: Sehen, was jeder sieht, und denken, was keiner denkt
Most ideas are too complicated

  1. Get the attention of your readers immediately
  2. Get everything upfront
  3. Remember that people scan papers when they read them
  4. A little motivation is good...but...don't make it all motivation!
You can quintuple
your readership

if

you let them in on
what it is that you are doing.

The most important parts of a paper are:

  1. Author
  2. Title
  3. Abstract
  4. First sentence
  5. Rest of first paragraph
  6. Second paragraph
  7. Rest of intro (?)
  8. First and last sentence of conclusions
  9. Rest of conclusions
  10. References
  11. Figures and tables
  12. The rest

How I changed my co-author's draft

In this section, we describe some of the highlights of the research area. We discuss some of the most significant, elegant, and useful algorithms, and some corresponding lower bound results. Since the literature in the area is vast and varied, we have found the selection and organisation of these results to be a formidable task. We have chosen to simplify our task by restricting our attention to four major categories of results: shared memory algorithms, distributed consensus algorithms, distributed network algorithms and concurrency control. Each of these categories has a very rich research literature of its own, and we think that together, they provide a represnetative picture of work in the area. Still, our description is incomplete, since we neglect many other interesting topics. In this section, we describe some of the highlights of the research area. We discuss some of the most significant, elegant, and useful algorithms, and some corresponding lower bound results. Since the literature in the area is vast and varied, we have found the selection and organisation of these results to be a formidable task. We have chosen to simplify our task by restricting our attention to four major categories of results: shared memory algorithms, distributed consensus algorithms, distributed network algorithms and concurrency control. Each of these categories has a very rich research literature of its own, and we think that together, they provide a represnetative picture of work in the area. Still, our description is incomplete, since we neglect many other interesting topics. Although we are neglecting many interesting topics, these four areas provide a representative picture of distributed computing.

The refereeing process

"It ain't over till it's over"

Technicalities

Research is fun...

Fun that we take very seriously!

Seriously enough that we want to tell others about what we have discovered.