Scientific Paper Outline

Title

Descriptive but not necessarily complete, accurate, succinct, catchy, possibly highlight the conclusion

Abstract

• Brief explanation of the specific problem to be solved
• Comment on existing standards or solutions to the problem
• Outline of proposed new solution
• Summary of how proposed solution was evaluated and outcomes
• DO NOT start with in this paper or similar

Introduction

• Description of area and topic
• Summary of background
• One sentence overview of key papers
• The hypothesis
• Synopsis of results, methods and outcomes
• Ramifications
• OMIT evidence, detail, jargon and mathematics

Background material/Related work

• State of the art
• Failing of state of the art
• Why problem is interesting
• Concepts or technologies the paper's contribution are built upon
• Benchmarks or baselines the contribution should be compared to
• What other people have said about the same problem

Main body

• Consists of Mathematical development, results and discussion
• Definitions
• Algorithms
• Description of test data
• Experimental method
• summaries of computed or experimental results
• Theorems, proofs
• Critical analysis of results
• Implications of result in the light of previous work

Conclusion

• Reiterates novel features and conclude
• Outline the main results
  • draw together themes
• Limitation of results
• Implications of results
• Avenues for further research

Acknowledgements

References

Appendices

Points to consider

• Try to predict what question and thoughts the reader will be having as they read and then address them as soon as possible.
• Bear in mind that audience is slightly different. When submitting it the first audience is the reviewers, this is different to when once published the reader selecting to read the paper and continuing to read it and use and cite it.
• Top down design
  • Starting with an outline and working out the details
• Failure mode analysis
  • For each sentence ask yourself could it be misread.
• Dependency analysis
  • Are the ideas presented in an order that assures that each point can be understood on the basis of readers assumed knowledge and the information provided by the preceding points.
• Optimization
  • Are there any unnecessary parts? Does the structure require the reader to remember too many details at once before linking them?
• Structured testing