How to Write a Good Paper: Some Suggestions

This month Krysztof Apt from the Dutch Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) gave an interesting presentation on how to write a good article. The presentation is now available on our video seminar search engine, ISLA-TV. The direct link to the video is here.

The abstract of the talk:

In this talk I shall go in detail into the writing process of a scientific article. In particular, I shall provide some suggestions how to organize the article, in what order to write its parts, how to organize and break down the proofs, how to link the results together, and what pitfalls to avoid.

CiteULike and more

CiteULike is in my opinion probably one of the finest web based tools for doing research. We even have our own group page there, in which you'll find a very broad scope of interests. Another one of my favourites is Diigo, which is a best-of-breed combination of Google Notebook and del.icio.us. It does much the same things as del.icio.us, but with this tool you can also highlight and annotate parts of documents found on the web and keep notes regarding those snippets. These will be stored, such that when you visit the page again, the highlighted sections will immediately stand out. Using their browser plugin/toolbar, you can even simultaneously add links and tags to other tagging software (Simpy, Furl, del.icio.us, Yahoo!, and Connotea to name just a few) and automatically create links in your own local bookmarks folder.

SVN and iWork files

This post should be relevant for anyone who uses SVN to back up their Mac. I've been getting very frustrated recently with backing up my iWork files - specifically, research posters made with Apple's Pages application. The problem is that Pages deletes some important SVN files every time you save your document.

Luckily, a fellow PhD student from Germany had the same problem and has made a solution. I've tried it out on my MacBook, and it seems to work very well.

Mastering Your PhD

'Mastering Your PhD' by Gosling and Noordam is a very practical book about various issues you encounter as a PhD, like attending conferences, yearly reviews, and of course thesis writing. Most of the chapters in the book have now been published as articles on the Science Careers website. One of the authors is Dutch and the other is German, it's nice to see a somewhat European slant on things.

Here is a list of the articles published so far. Recommended!

• Starting Off on the Right Foot
• Getting the Most Out of Progress Reviews
• Mentors, Leadership, and Community
• Relating to Your Co-Workers' Personality Types
• Mastering Your PhD: Strength in Numbers
• Mastering Your PhD: Celebrate Your Success
• Mastering Your PhD: Science Papers that Shine
• Making the Most of a Conference
• Dealing With Setbacks
• Group Dynamics
• Setting Goals for Success
• Running in Place
• Giving a Great Presentation

Getting the most out of your publications

The "Careers" section of Science Magazine published an article on how to get the most out of your publications:
Maximizing Productivity and Recognition, Part 1: Publication, Citation, and Impact

Hi

This is the first post of this blog, so I think there should be something about what the purpose of this blog is. We are a few PhD students at ILPS, the Information and Language Processing group at University of Amsterdam.

In this blog we want to discuss questions about "doing research" and about being a PhD student in general. We also want to collect links to resources we find useful.