Common Editorial Issues in Writing Papers/Reports

General Editorial:

1) All variables should be italic, in $$, e.g., $M$. All non-variables will be non-italic, including function names and sub-indices.

2) You should have a comma or full stop after all equations. All figure captions should end with a full stop, and all words in captions should start with small caps, except for first word and large-cap acronyms.

3) There should always be space between units and numbers. E.g., 5 dB, 10 meters, 100 Watt, etc. There should be space after full stops and commas, and there should be no space before footnote numbers. There should always be a space between an acronym definition and the text, e.g. "signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)", and between a reference and the text, e.g. " as studied in [1].".

4) Do not use too long paragraphs (typically should not be longer than a quarter of a column). Group your ideas, and make sure there is a coherent idea within each paragraph, and the idea in the paragraphs smoothly flow from one to other.

Paper/Section Titles:

1) Choose the title of the paper and the corresponding sections/subsections carefully, so that they describe their content well and concisely. One should be able to have a good idea about the contents and flow of a paper by just looking at the titles of the sections and subsections, so they should be descriptive enough.

Equations:

1) Do not leave any empty line in Latex before/after an equation environment; otherwise it will add additional space in the PDF compiled version.

2) All equations should end with a comma or a full stop (unless there are intermediate steps in an equation).

3) You should not include equation numbers if the equation is broken across multiple lines (use \nonumber)

4) After an equation, start with capital letters only if you used a full stop after the equation. If you used a comma, you should continue with small caps.

5) Think of the equation as part of the previous sentence; e.g., do not end the sentence with a full stop and then give the equation, which would be in a separate sentence.

How to Write Introduction:

1) http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/intro-style.html -- (you may consider switching the order of paragraphs 3 and 4, give a literature review about what people have done and what is missing, then our contribution in this paper.

Paper Flow:

1) When starting a section or a subsection, you typically have to have introduction sentence(s) and give some context for the rest of the section/subsection.

2) Explain your equations and give insights about them. Relate them to other equations or concepts in the paper whenever needed.

3) Flow of the paper is very important. You need to link paragraphs to each other when going from one paragraph to another paragraph, and include some connection sentences/words. For more information, see e.g.:

• http://writing.umn.edu/sws/quickhelp/style/flow.html

• https://www1.villanova.edu/content/villanova/artsci/acsp/writingcenter/resources/handouts/_jcr_content/pagecontent/download_4/file.res/DoesMyWritingFlow.pdf (for transitional phrases)

• https://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Teaching/learning/how-to-lectures/HowToResearch-WrittenCommunication.pdf

References:

1) IEEE has special formatting for references. You can not just use bibtex from ieeexplore or Google Scholar and you need to do some further editing. E.g., all conferences should be in a format such as "in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Commun. (ICC)". Remove any additional year from conference name and reorder ieeexplore formatting as needed. For more information, see e.g.: http://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecitationref.pdf

2) All acronyms in paper titles should be taken into additional { } sign in Bibtex, so that they appear as large caps. Otherwise Latex converts them to small caps.

3) For all months, abbreviate after first three letters, e.g., Mar., Jan., etc. (except obviously May). Conference/Journal names are also typically abbreviated in a certain way. See e.g. the following for commonly used IEEE Journal abbreviations: http://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/Journal-Titles-and-Abbreviations.pdf

4) Remove any redundant information, such as the number of times the conference is held, "Annual meeting", additional year information, etc. For example, "in Proc. 49th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton), 2015" should instead read "in Proc. IEEE Allerton Conf. Commun., Control, Computing (Allerton)". When you copy/paste bibtex from Google Scholar or ieeexplore, year typically shows up 2-3 times, and instead it should be there only once, under year field.

5) In online sources, the publication venue is also typically shuffled. For example, "Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Transactions on" should read "IEEE Trans. Aerospace Electronic Syst.".

6) Include venue information for conferences. E.g., "Miami, FL", "San Francisco, CA", "London, UK", "Beijing, China", etc. For US based conferences, typically only the acronym for the state name is used rather than USA.

7) Do not use "et al." in author names and give the full list (unless otherwise requested by the conference/journal).

Figures:

1) Your figures should be very readable and clear. Font size in all figures should be at least as large as the figure caption's font size; make sure this is the case after you integrate the figure into the paper (it may be misleading in Matlab). If you have markers, they should be large enough so that they can be easily readable. Looking at some figures quickly and their caption, a reader should be able to get a good idea about the main points in the paper quickly.

2) Figures should be readable in B/W: distinguishing the curves in your figure only by colors will not work there. You may need to consider different combinations of markers and line styles to present your results in a clear way. You may also consider drawing ellipses on the figure itself to cluster and label different curves. A little thicker curves and markers may look more readable.

3) In figure x-axis or y-axis labels, any metric that you use should also have its unit, e.g., SINR (dB), Distance (meters), etc. Figures should not have titles on their top, any related information should all be embodied within the caption.

4) Remove white spaces in your figures. Consider letting them span the whole column. Make them have a good aspect ratio (square is common); in Matlab, if you play with the aspect ratio, they may appear in odd sizes in your PDF draft and will look ugly. Do not waste space unnecessarily, e.g., by making them too tall. Check some good IEEE journal papers on examples on how good figures look.

Additional References:

• https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-style.html

• https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-bugs.html

Some Common Errors and Suggestions for Fall 2020 Interim Project Updates:

• • Please use grammar/spell check of MS Word or Overleaf. Better, you can use Grammarly for MS Word: https://www.grammarly.com/office-addin

  • References at the end of a sentence: Use them before the full stop, not after. E.g., not do this. [1] But rather do this [2].

  • Whenever applicable, include transmission/reception frequency as a column in your survey tables of each subtopic.

  • Make the references the first column in your tables.

  • Consider using multiple sub-sections in your sections (i.e. for each subtopic) to structure your ideas. Otherwise it becomes difficult to track your report with many back-to-back paragraphs in the same section. You may consider moving your survey tables to the beginning of the subtopic section, refer them at the very beginning, and use some categories from those tables as your subsections.

  • It is OK (and strongly encouraged for surveys) if you reuse figures from some other reference, but you should cite them in the figure's caption. If you have a good idea to develop a figure yourself to highlight your understanding, that is better. End figure captions with a full-stop. Make sure you refer to each figure inside of your text and explain it properly.

  • If you are copying a figure from another PDF, the best way is to zoom into the PDF and then take the screenshot. Otherwise your screenshot will be blurry.

  • Cite references with brackets, i.e. [16], [17], [18]..., not 16, 17, 18

  • Leave space between units and numbers, e.g. 10 GHz.

  • References are missing some key information, e.g. month, city/country for conferences, long forms of conference names, etc.

  • Include page numbers on all pages at the bottom of the page

  • Do not randomly use small and Large caps for some letters in YoUr Text.

  • Using a check-mark and an X sign in your tables makes your table more readable compared to "Yes" and "No" in some rows.

  • You can work on the widths of your columns to fit your tables into the page and make them smaller (minimize white spaces)

  • Align the right end of the text with the right margin.

  • Make sure all your acronyms are defined in their first appearance, as soon as possible (ASAP), in the format indicated in this bullet.

  • List the references in the order they appear in the text. I.e., the first reference that shows up in your text should not start with e.g. [10] and then change randomly. Latex handles this automatically with \cite{}. For MS Word, you need some manual work. The proper way to include references in MS Word is to create a "Numbered List" in your references section. And then when you wish to refer to a reference, go to the "References" tab, choose Reference type as "Numbered Item", and the next pull down to "Paragraph number". When you do that, it helps automatically updating the references within text. I.e., when you add many references, you select all your text that includes cross-references, right-click, and choose "Update field", all will be updated automatically. You can also include and update your figure/table references in a very similar way.