General guideline:
- The most important factors to get a good mark in this assignment are: clarity and correctness of your writing, how nicely you can explain the main content of the paper, finding good sides in the paper, and finding shortcomings/what could be added more in the paper.
- Try to understand the paper as much as possible. It may require you to read the paper many times (may be at least 10 times!) again and again. A complete understanding of this paper will give you a clear and complete idea about how a research paper should be written. This will help you when you shall write your own research paper.
- Write your report in your own language. You are free to copy some figures or tables from the paper if necessary. Because, drawing all their figures anew or generating all their tables and data anew by yourself is not possible.
- Try to find positive sides of the paper. For example, the idea of the paper may be very interesting, may be novel, may have been used by many papers later, results might have solved a long standing open problem, writing style is very good and clear, results are deep, etc. Mention them in your report.
- Similarly, try to find its shortcomings. For example, poor writing quality, vague idea, unclear methods, dull theories used, results not deep, survey data not sufficient, many things not clear and could be improved, idea not novel and almost same as previous papers, error in results, confusing, etc. Mention them in your report.
- Important: Make your report easier to understand than the paper, so that a reader can understand the content of the paper by reading only your report and without looking into the original paper.
- Add additional examples, figures, data, tables and explanation as necessary to make the report easy to understand. If necessary, if possible, and if applicable, then you may write some simple code or do some little experiment or survey to verify/see yourself the results of this paper.
- If necessary, look into the references in this paper to understand the material of the paper.
- If necessary, look into the papers that have used this paper as a reference. You can use the site "Google Scholar" and "Microsoft Academic" (they will come in Lecture 4) to find the list of papers that have published after this paper and have used this paper as a reference.
- You may need to look into some books or materials to understand the topics and content of the paper. For example, if your paper is on database, then you may need to look into the undergraduate database book for the terms, definitions, theories, and other materials that have been used in the paper.
- Format of the report: Report can be be written in LaTeX or word, but you are recommended to use a journal template such as Elsevier, Springer or IEEE. The length of the report should be within 10 pages, 10-12 fonts, single column.
- Your report may contain the following sections: abstract, introduction, main results of the paper, method/techniques used in the paper, positive sides of the paper and significance of the results, shortcomings and missing things in the paper, conclusion, references. You may add additional sections if you want.
- While you are looking into the paper and the related references and while you are writing your report, you may think yourself what has been done in other papers that are related to the results of this paper or that have used the results of this paper. Also you can think what can be done in future. But it is not necessary to include them in your report. You can include them in your upcoming project in this course. In other way to say, this paper will give you a lead for your project. However, in your upcoming project you may deviate (change) from the topic of this paper and will get more freedom to formulate your own project and investigate new problems. While you rewrite this paper, think about those things so that during your project you may get benefit from them.
Writing examples: [pdf]
One good example from previous semester: [pdf] (The original paper was this [pdf], in area "Algorithms and Theory". The student here added lot of own new examples. Additionally, she implementated the algorithms in Java by herself and did some experiment. These showed her clear undestanding of the paper and the clarity in her writing.)