An important part of any scientific research is to document it. This is often done through scientific confernces or journal articles. Hence it is important to learn how to prepare and submit such papers. Most conferences accept typically the papers in PDF format but require the papers to be prepared on MSWord or in LaTeX. While working with many students in the past we noticed however that those students using Word often spend unnecessarily countles hours on trying to make there papers beautiful while actually violating the template provided by the conference. Furthermrore, we noticed that the same students had issues with bibliography management. Instead of Word helping the student it provided the illusion to be easier than LaTeX but when adding up the time spend on the paper we found that LaTeX actually saved time. This has been especially true with the advent of collaborative editing services such as sharelatex cite{} and overleaf cite{}.
In this section we provide you with a professional template that is used for either system based on the ACM standard that you can use to write papers. Naturally this will be extremely useful if the quality of your research is strong enough to be submitted to a conference. We structure this section as follows. Although we do not recommend that you use MSWord for your editing of a scientific paper, we have included a short section about it and outline some of its pitfalls that initially you may not think is problematic, but has proven to be an issue with students. Next we will focus on introducing you to LaTeX and showcasing you the advantages and disadvantages. We will dedictae an entire section on bibliography management and teach you jhow to use jabref which clearly has advantages for us.
Having a uniform report format not only helps the students but allow allows the comparision of paper length and effort as part of teaching a course. We have added an entire section to this chapter that discusses how we can manage a Class Proceedings form papers that are contributed by teams in the class.
The report format we suggest here is based on the standard ACM proccedings format. It is of very high quality and can be adapted for your own activities. Moreover, it is possible to use most of teh text to adapt to other formats in case the conference you intend to submit your paper to has a different format. The ACM format is always a good start.
Important is that you do not need to change the template but you can change some parameters in case you are not submitting the paper to a conference but use it for class papers. Certainly you should not change the spacing or the layout and instead focus on writing content. As for bibliography management we recommend you use jabref which we will introduce in Section ref{}.
We recommend that you carefully study the requirements for the report format. We would nat want that your paper gets rejected by a journal, conference or the class just because you try to modify the format or do not follow the establishe publication guidlines.
The template we are providing is available from:
Convenient compressed files are available at
You will find in it a modified ACM proceedings templates for Word and for LaTeX that has an identification box removed on the lower left hand side of the firts page. This is done for classes so that you have more space to write. In case you must submit to a confernce you can use the original ACM template. This template can be found at
Althogh the initial requirement for some conferences or journals is the document PDF, in many cases you must be prepared to provide the source when submitting to the conference. This includes the submission of the original images in an images foder. You may ba asked to package the document into a folder with all of its sources and submit to the conference for professional publication.
Microsoft word will provide you with the initial impression that you will safe lots of time writing in it while you see the layout of the document. This will be initaially true, but once you progress to the more challanging parts and later pages such as image menagement and bibliography management you will see some issues. Thes include that figure placement in Word need sto be done just right in order for images to be where they need. We have seen students spending hours with the placement of figures in a paper but when they did additional cahnges the images jumped around and were not at the place wher eteh students expected them to be. SO if you work with images, make sure you understand how to place them. Also always use relative caption counters so that if an image gets placed elsewhere the counter stays consistent. So nefer use justthe number, but a refernce to the figure when referring to it. Recently a new bibliography management system was added to Word. However, however it is not well documented and the refrences are placed in the system bibliography rather than a local managed bibliography. This mah have severe consequences when working with many authors on a paper. The same is true when using Endnote. We have heard in many occasions that the combination of endnote and Word destroyed documents. You certainly do not want that to happen the day before your deadline. Also in classes we observed that those using LaTeX deliver better structured and written papers as the focus is on text and not beatuiful layout.
For all these reasons we do not recommend that you use Word.
In LaTeX where we have an easier time with this as we can just ignore all of these issues due to relative good image palcement and excellent support for academic reference management. Hence, it is in your best interest to use LaTeX. The information we provide here will make it easy for you to get started and write a paper in no time as it is just like filling out a form.
Today reaserch is done in potentially large reasearch teams. This also include thewriting of a document. There are multiple ways this is done these days and depends on the system you chose.
In MSWord you can use skydrive, while for LaTeX you can use sharelatex and overleaf. However, in many cases the use of github is possible as the same grousps that develop teh code are also familiar with github. Thus we provide you here also with the introdcution on how to write a document in github while group members can contribute.
Here are the options:
Obviously writing a paper takes time and you need to carfully make sure you devote enough time to it. The important part is that the paper should not be an after thought but should be the initial activity to conduct and execute your research. Remeber that
For deadlines the following will get you in trouble:
In this section we summarize a number of checks that you may perform to make sure your paper is properly fomated and in excelent shape. Naturally this list is just a partial list and if you find things we shoudl add here, let us know.
In case of a class
In case you are allowed to use word in class, such as the one we teach at IU, the following applies in addition:
If you observe something missing let us know.
Latex can be easily installoed on any computer as long as you have enough space. Furthermore if your machine can execute the make command we have provided in the standard report format a simple Makefile that allows you to do editing with immediate preview as documented in the LaTeX lesson.
For the class we will manage all papers via github.com. You will be added to our github at
and assigned an hid (homework index directory) directory with a unique hid number for you. In addition, once you decide for a project, you will aslso get a project id (pid) and a directory in which you place the projects. Projects must not be placed in hid directories as they are treated differently and a class proceedings is automatically created based on your submission.
As part of the hid directory, you will need to create a README.md file in it, that must follow a specific format. The good news is that we have developed an easy template that with common sense you can modify easily. The template is located at
As the format may have been updated over time it does not hurt to revisit it and compare with your README.md and make corrections. It is important that you follow the format and not eliminate the lines with the three quotes. The text in the quotes is actually yaml. yaml is a data format the any data scientist must know. If you do not, you can look it up. However, if you follow our rules you should be good. If you find a rule missing for our purpose, let us know. We like to keep it simple and want you to fill out the template with your information.
Simple rules: