report: Disposition

[mewmew]

Skeleton of the report.

• Title
• Abstract
• (Glossary)
• Introduction/Background (prior work, required to understand the solution)
• Body (several sections)
• Related work (if not part of introduction) (related work not necessary to understand the solution)
• Discussion (subjective)/Conclusions and future work
• References

Title

Short, catchy, true. 2 seconds to grab attention.

Abstract

• Written last
• Sell your idea
• 100-200 words
• Four parts/sentences
  • What's the problem
  • How did you solve it
  • What are the results
  • Conclusions (what it means for the future)
• Make sure the abstract stands on its own
  • No references
  • Avoid acronyms

Introduction

• Describe the problem
  • May include related work, but ...
• State your contributions
  • Perhaps as a bulleted list
• SKIP disposition section. Avoid "the rest of the paper is structured as follows", use forward references instead.
• Use references for each new introduced concept.

Body

• Meta-study: Existing methods -> Comparison -> Suggestions
• Do it top-down; intuition first, details later
• Choose the most direct route to the idea!
  • The way you came up with the idea is usually not interesting
• The introduction makes claims
• The body provides evidence
• Evidence can be analysis and comparison, theorems, measures, case studies ...
• Imagine a reader who wants to repeat your experiments. Is your information enough to do that? Be rigorous.

Related work

Prior work is a subset of related work. Prior work may be introduced in the introduction.

• Part of introduction, or after the body.
• Give credit!
  • Giving credit to someone else does not take away from yours.

Conclusion

• Summarize your contributions
  • Be honest, mention weaknesses.
• Conclusions from the results
• Implications for the future
• No new information in this section!

References

• Always refer to the literature when
  • You claim things for which there is no evidence in this paper
  • You first introduce an established concept
• Use Vancouver style [1]
  • Don't write, in [42], foo says bar. References should be invisible. Foo Bar describes, blah blah [42].
  • Prefer alphabetical sorting of the authors surname, rather than reference order.
• Avoid web references.
  • If you must use web references, date them in the list.

[mewmew]

The disposition of the report is completed. Closing this issue for now.

The howto label has been attached for future reference, as this issue outlines things to keep in mind when writing a report.