Writing a paper ….

I am struggling to write the paper… So first, I need to clarify what is the purpose of the paper and what I am going to do. This outline maybe useful in the future.

We are planning to write a paper to the 3rd IFIP Conference on Biologically-Inspired Collaborative Computing (BICC 2010). We plan to desrcibe on the experimental design and result that we have obtained so far. Based on our previous discussion, this paper highlights more on the analysis, literature and work in progress. Main contribution of the paper is to odentify what are the potential properties from immune systems that can be instantiated to the problem that we have in mind. In writing the paper, the first thing I should have to remember is to relate my paper with the conference theme….

Lets make this as exercise, a guideline to myself, so that I have a clearer mind in my writing

BRAINSTORMING

Writing abstract

When writing the abstract, some questions that I need to ask

• What is the purpose of my paper? This should, as with any abstract, be a general definition statement about the objectives of the paper.
• What approach am I using? I.e. am I reviewing the literature, describing a case study, supporting a research hypothesis, and if the latter, what is my research design and research methodology?
• What are my findings?
• What is the import of my findings?

Outline the content of the paper

General Questions that need to be answered in writing the paper.

• Part 1: Specify what problem (topic) is being addressed: Why is the problem (topic) interesting!
• Part 2: What is the current state of the art of solutions? Or, how is the topic currently being addressed in the literature?Why is the current literature inadequate?
• Part 3: What is the proposed solution?What is the motivation?Why is it interesting?
• Part 4: Discussion. How does the proposed solution compare with others? In theory? In practice? What are the weaknesses?
• Part 5: Conclusion. Summarize proposed solution and why it is interesting.Summarize weaknesses.Identify open questions.

RESPOND

Collecting reference again

I realised my references are somehow outdated, and updation is required upon submission of my conference paper. Collection is tedious. 50% of references that I have collected in my first year is not referred at all since during my first year the area of research is still broad. It is a good idea when I started writing a conference paper in my third year as I start to look back on al the references that we have. Jon has suggested that we wrote a paper ( publishable or not every month, so I can start identify the hole in my research, things that I consider important or not should be identified prior to my thesis writing). Having the general outline of thesis is helpful, and as we move on we know which references are important and start writing literature on a specific title. I collected all the bibtex entry and update. Consistency is important while writing the entry, cannot really copy and paste it. I updated and collected my bibitem using BibDesk but for this conference, I have to rewrite since I have difficulties in getting the format that the LNCS provided, there is but it goes crazy with by .bib file.  Below, is the seven standard styles in latex, I prefer to use the apa standard format (author, year) format

Seven standard style

Every computer with LaTeX comes with the following seven standard styles. While they work, we recommend the natbib interpretations below. NatBib is a citation package that standardizes citation commands across many different bibliography styles, so you can switch from using plain.bst to acm.bst without having to change your in-text citations.

plain.bst
acm.bst
ieeetr.bst
alpha.bst
abbrv.bst
siam.bst