How to write a paper

Many of us don't know how to prepare a paper for technical symposium, Journal, Conferences.

The following content is the useful one for preparing paper for the journal/conference.

How to write a paper

1. Preliminary
The first activity for publishing a technical paper is to figure out your technical area of interest. Make sure the you had carried out enough studies on basics of that topic. Then you have you to update yourself with the ongoing technical happenings in your chosen field. You can do this by
1) Reading and googling a lot of technical papers. There are a lot of journals and IEEE papers floating around in net.
2) Go to one or more conferences, listen carefully to the best talks, and find out what people are thinking about.


Once you are done with the above mentioned steps, then you are eligible for writing a paper

2. Read existing Papers
Read everything that might be relevant gives you different perspective of the focus topic. But be selective too, for not getting to much deviated from you topic of interest. Getting used to simulation software is much useful for simulating your work. You can find a lot of time during the days and utilize those holidays & free days.

3. A jump start
When you first start reading up on a new field, ask your fellow researcher what the most useful journals and conference proceedings are in your field, and ask for a list of important papers that you should read. This activity will give you a jump start.

4. Crack the jargons and terms
One of among the tough nuts to crack is to understand the paper published by others. The easiest way is to is by reading it many times. The more times you read the more will be revealed to you. Keep the Internet handy so that you can crack the jargons and terms, which you may find strange.

5. Write down your studies
Write down speculations, interesting problems, possible solutions, random ideas, references to look up, notes on papers you've read, outlines of papers to write, and interesting quotes. Read back through it periodically. Keeping a journal of your research activities and ideas is very useful.

7. Bits and pieces together
Now you can identify important open problems in your research field and also you will be very much aware of what you are doing and what you have to do. The more you go, you'll notice that the bits of random thoughts start to come together and form a pattern, which may be a bright enough for a good paper.

8. Simulation softwares easies
Please don’t pick overly ambitious topics; instead identify a realistic size problem. Gather the Matlab files available in the Internet that is related to your topic and simulate it for the claimed results. Please don’t expect the Mfiles readily available for a solution published in a paper. But you can make it of your own by modifying and adding. Believe me, Matlab is a very easy tool! Once you are able to get the simulated outputs of your solution, you can carry on for making a paper out of it.

9. Essence of your work
The essence of your work can be diagnosed by analyzing below listed points. We can increase the maturity of the paper by improving these.
Significance: Why was this work done? Did you solve an important problem of current interest or is it an obscure or obsolete problem?
Originality/Novelty: Is your approach novel or is it tried-and-true? Did you need to develop new tools, either analytical or physical?
Completeness: Have you tested a wide range of scenarios, or is this just a simple proof-of-concept?
Correct: Is your solution technically sound or are there errors? [3]
Consider improving the same.

10. Anatomy of Paper
Generally a paper has seven sections and a maximum of four pages. They are
1. Abstract,
2. Introduction,
3. Existing techniques,
4. Your contribution,
5. Results and
6. Conclusion.

11. The procedure
As a part of your paper publication, you can start documenting the ‘existing techniques’ from the scrap journal you did during the studies. Here you have to extract what all are the techniques existing as a solution for the particular problem and the pros and cons of those.
Next, document the ‘introduction’ about what is the topic and what you are going to do. Better to keep it short. Follows your contribution and the simulated results.
1. Describe the problem
2. State your contributions


‘Abstract’ is one section you can work on in the last, as it has to cover the all the sections very briefly. Please note that Abstract makes the committee members to decide whether or not to read your paper. Generally four lines are sufficient for this.
1. State the problem
2. Say why it’s an interesting problem
3. Say what your solution achieves
4. Say what follows from your solution

12. Section by section

The divide-and-conquer strategy works on a day-to-day level as well. Instead of writing an entire paper, focus on the goal of writing a section, or outline. Remember, every task you complete gets you closer to finishing your paper.

13. Get a pre-review

Now your paper is ready. You can ask your peers or professors to review your paper. Next is to find the right place to publish it. You can start of with national level conferences, which often gets conducted in many universities. Then once you gain a level of confidence, you can proceed to international conferences and journals.

 Common mistakes

Wrong sequence in Figure and Table numbering
Misalignment of columns
Usage of figures from another paper without credit and permission
18. Where to publish
Generally, there are three main choices: