How to Publish a Paper?

1
Muhammad Saadi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Central Punjab
 Section 1
Writing a research paper
Seven Simple Suggestions…
2
I would like to acknowledge that some of the material is taken from Professor Dr.
Simon Jones lectures.
3

#1 Don’t wait … write

4 Writing papers: model 1

Do Write
Idea
research paper
5 Writing papers: model 2

Do Write
Idea
research paper

Why ?
Write Do
Idea
Paper research

Forcing Function
Early writing is good way of communication and research is all about communication.
If you have something written, you have a new mechanism of communication
6

Paper writing is not a the way of

reporting a research

It s a way to do research
7 Don’t be intimidated

 Write a paper, give a talk, no

matter how insignificant it
is…
 Writing a paper is how you
develop the idea at first place
 It turns out to be more
interesting and challenging
that it seemed at first

Natural State of a
Always true? Researcher
8

#2 Identify your key idea

9
Goal of Paper
To convey a useful and
reusable idea
Idea ==VIRUS
It should effect the mind of
the reader

Even the greatest idea is worthless if it is not

conveyed
10 The Idea Idea
A re-usable insight,
useful to the reader

Your paper should have just “one ping” i.e.

one crystal clear, sharp idea
Your idea may be blur when you start writing
but it must be clear when you finish writing
If you have a lot of ideas, write a lot of
papers
11 Can you hear the ping?

 Many papers have good ideas but not distil what they are
 Make sure that reader should have no doubt what is the idea is
discussed in the paper. Be 100% explicit
The main idea of this paper is…
In this section, we present the main contributions of this paper …
 Repeat the main idea in different parts of the paper (of course not
with the same wording)

Don t let your reader to be a detective

12

#3 Tell a story
13
Your narrative flow

Imagine you are explaining in a class

Here is the problem
It’s an interesting problem (motivate) Live conversation VS paper writing
What is the difference?
It’s an unsolved problem (why)
Here is my idea (Virus entered the mind)
My work details
Here, how my idea compares to other researchers idea
14

If a reader stops reading at some point, he/she should

get something valuable

Every bit the reader reads, his desire to continue to

read should increase
15 Typical structure of a paper

 Title
 Abstract

Number of readers
 Introduction
 The problem
 My idea
 The details
 Related work
 Conclusion and further work
16 The Introduction
Introduce the
problem with an
example
Describe the problem
State your contributions
…and that is all
State your
contributions in
bullet form
ONE PAGE!
17 Molehills not mountains

 It is very important to know the position of an object. The are many way
to localization [1,2,3,4]. Many researchers do localization [20, 22, 23].
It is very important.

Which one is
 Sometimes it is desirable to know the precise location of the object. For interesting?
instance, intelligent transportation system [1], home automation [2],
surveillance [3], indoor navigation [4]. Positioning systems exist in
literature which are based on received signal strength (RSS) [4], time
difference of arrival (TDOA) [5], angle of arrival (AOA) [6], image
sensors [7], correlation [8], fingerprinting [9].

Don t let your readers to fall off

18

#4 Nail your contributions

19 Contributions should be refutable

NO YES
We describe localization system. Its really In this paper, we propose a novel indoor
amazing localization system (Section 2) which is
based on light emitting diode and
demonstrated it through experimentation
(Section 3)
We study its properties We prove that our proposed algorithm is
well suited for a number of indoor
environment (Section 5)
We used the system in practice For the validity of the idea, we performed
the experiment in a room with an area of
25 m2. Sun light entering the room
(Section 6)
20 No “rest of the paper is”

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2

talks about the related work done in the domain of indoor
localization. Section 3 is about proposed method. Results
are mentioned in Section 4…

Use forward references from the narrative in the

introduction
21

#5 Related work … later

22 Structure

 Abstract
 Introduction
Related work
 Proposed Idea
 Design and Implementation
 Results and Discussion
Related work
 Conclusion and further works
23
24 Related work

 One Fallacy
 To make my work look good, I have to make other people work look bad
 Credit
 Credit is like love not money
 Giving credit will not make your work worse
 For example, Saadi et al proposed an inspiring method for indoor localization
which overcome the shortcoming of X [1], Y[2]. In this work, we optimize
Saadi’s algorithm in Z dimension
 Acknowledge weakness in your approach
25

#6 Put your reader first

26 Presenting the idea

Explain it as if you are speaking to someone on white

board
Conveying the intuition is primary, not secondary
Once the reader has the intuition, he/she can follow the
details (not vice versa)
Even if he/she skips the details, she still takes away
something valuable
27
How to convey intuition?
Introduce problem
Give examples
Don t let your reader to be
detective or stupid

Research is full of blind vallies. Don t take your reader

to those vallies which you faced
For reader choose the direct path
28

#7 Listen to your readers

29 Getting help

Friends
(Ask them to point out where they were lost while reading
the paper. Not only point out grammatical mistakes)
If your friend tells you on paragraph X, section 3, he was
lost. Don’t think he is stupid that’s why, he was not able to
understand. IMPROVE YOUR EXPLANATION!!!
Experts
30

Section 2
Journal Submission and Publication
31 Journal Indexing

 Thomson Reuters (ISI Indexed)

 http://thomsonreuters.com/en.html
 Master Journal List (http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/)

 Scopus Indexed
 http://www.scopus.com/

 Neither ISI nor Scopus

 Fabricated and Fictitious Journals

32 Famous Journal Publishers

 There are more than 25000 journals and more than 2300 publishers
 More than 600,000 articles submission per year

Nature Publishing Group University Press

IEEE ACM
Springer OSA
Elsevier IET
Hindawi IETE
Taylor and Francis IEICE
Sage Many more…
33 Impact Factor

 The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been
cited in a particular year.
 For example, the 2016 impact factor of a journal X would be calculated as follows:

 A = the number of times articles published in 2014 and 2015 were cited by indexed journals
during 2016
 B = the total number of "citable items" published in 2014 and 2015.
Problems with
So 2016 impact factor = A/B impact factor

 The JCR also lists journals and their impact factors and ranking in the context of their specific
field(s)
34 Top Journals

Source: https://scholar.google.com.pk/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en
35 Top Journals
Computer networks and wireless communication

Source: https://scholar.google.com.pk/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=eng_computernetworkswirelesscommunication
36 How to know the worth of a journal?

 Impact Factor
 SJR Ranking (http://www.scimagojr.com/)

Source: http://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=19700177336&tip=sid&clean=0
37 SJR Ranking of Nature

Source: http://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=21206&tip=sid&clean=0
38 HEC Journal Ranking

Source: http://www.hec.gov.pk/InsideHEC/Divisions/QALI/QADivision/Documents/MechanismtilJune2013.pdf
39 HEC Recognized Engineering &
Technology Journals
 http://www.hec.gov.pk/InsideHEC/Divisions/QALI/QADivision/Do
cuments/Engineering%20%20Technology.pdf

 Check indexing before submission

40 What happens when you submit a paper to
a journal

Assistant Associate
Editor Reviewer
Editor Editor

Associate
Reviewer Editor Author
Editor
41 Review Time

 Most painful period

 Can be from few weeks to few month or even more than a year
 Why?
 Reviewing a paper is a volunteer work
 Too many papers to review
 Some journals mention average review time
 If the review time is not mentioned then how to know?
42 Example of Bad Luck … (1)
43 Example of Bad Luck … (2)
44 If you are lucky to get reviews

Reviews from the Editor

Reviewers from the Reviewer
Decision
Accept (Extremely rare)
Accept after minor revision
Accept after major revision
Reject (mostly the case… reasons?)
45 Example – Accept after minor revision … (1)
46 Example – Accept after minor revision … (1)
47 Example – Accept after major revision
48 If the paper is “rejected”. What to do?

Relax. This is not the end of the world

If you are rejected after a peer review process… consider
yourself lucky
Improve it and submit it some where else
Respect reviewer suggestions
49

What we can do?

50

LAST WORD !!!

51 How important writing is ?