How to Succeed in Postgraduate Study

Publishing Papers

by Marie desJardins

Publishing your ideas is important for several reasons: it gives you a source of feedback from people who read your papers; it establishes you as a member of the research community (useful for getting a job down the line); and it forces you to clarify your ideas and to fit them in the context of the current state of research in your field.

There are two key properties of a good paper: significant content -- original, important ideas that are well developed and tested -- and good writing style. The degree to which the paper's content has to be "significant" depends on where you're submitting it. Preliminary ideas and work in progress are more suitable for a workshop or symposium; well-developed, extensively tested ideas are more appropriate for a journal. One way to decide where your paper should be submitted is to read papers in potentially appropriate publications (e.g., last year's conference proceedings and current journal issues). Another method is to show a draft or outline of the paper to your supervisor or other colleagues and ask their advice.

If you have a great idea, but present it poorly, your paper probably won't be accepted. Be sure you know what the point of the paper is and state it clearly and repeatedly. The same goes for the key technical ideas. Don't make the readers work to figure out what's important -- tell them explicitly. Otherwise, they might get it wrong, if they bother to finish reading the paper at all. State the problem you're addressing, why it's important, how you're solving it, what results you have, how other researchers have addressed the same or similar problems, and why your method is different or better.

Write for the audience that you expect to read the paper, just as you would plan a talk. Give more background for general audiences, less background and more technical detail for specialized audiences. Use a running example if possible, especially if your paper is dense with equations and algorithms.

Don't try to put every idea in your thesis into one conference paper. Break it down into pieces, or write one or two longer journal articles.

As you refine your ideas, you can republish in new forms, but be sure you're adding new material, not just rehashing the same ideas. Some papers start as short workshop papers, evolve into conference papers, and eventually -- with the addition of detailed empirical results or formal proofs -- become journal articles. It's usually okay to publish the same or substantially similar papers in multiple workshops, but papers for conferences and journals generally have to be original, unpublished work.

It is critical that any paper you plan to submit be read by someone else first, if only to check for typos, grammatical errors, and style. A good reviewer will give you feedback on the organization and content of the paper as well. The more tightly refereed the publication you're submitting to, the more trouble you should go to in order to have it pre-reviewed. For a workshop paper, having your supervisor read it over (assuming you can convince them to do so!) is probably enough. For a refereed conference, have one or two other postgraduate students read it as well. For a journal paper, you should probably find researchers who are active in the field, preferably at other institutions (to give breadth), read it over and give you comments. This is where the network of colleagues you should build comes in handy.

If you go through multiple revisions of a paper, don't expect the same person (even -- perhaps especially -- your supervisor) to keep reading new drafts. You should only give a revised draft to your supervisor or another reviewer if the paper has changed substantially and she has said that she is willing to reread it.

If your paper is rejected, keep trying! Take the reviews to heart and try to rewrite the paper, addressing the reviewer's comments. You'll get more substantial and useful reviews from journals than conferences or workshops. Often a journal paper will be returned for revisions; usually a conference paper will just be accepted or rejected outright. After reading the review the first time, put it aside. Come back to it later, reading the paper closely to decide whether the criticisms were valid and how you can address them.

You will often find that reviewers make criticisms that are off-target because they misinterpreted some aspect of your paper, or just because they're lazy. If so, don't let it get to you - just rewrite that part of your paper more clearly so that the same misunderstanding won't happen again. It's frustrating to have a paper rejected because of a misunderstanding, but at least it's something you can fix. On the other hand, criticisms of the content of the paper may require more substantial revisions -- rethinking your ideas, running more tests, or reworking an analysis. (On the gripping hand, sometimes a paper is rejected for neither of these reasons, but because of politics: somebody on the reviewing committee dislikes your topic, your supervisor, your writing style, or even you personally for some reason. This is all the more reason to try resubmitting to a different conference or journal!)