Research skills
Writing papers, giving research talks, and writing research proposals are key skills, but they
aren't easy. This page describes how I approach each of these three challenges,
in the hope that they may be useful to you.
You probably have ideas of your own. Can you share them with other readers of this page?
Here's a
Wiki page
that anyone can edit, where you can add your comments on the presentations below, your own
thoughts and suggestions, and pointers to other material you have found useful.
Here is a version of this page, translated into Russian.
How to give a good research talk
"How to give a good research talk",
Simon Peyton Jones, John Launchbury, John Hughes,
SIGPLAN Notices 28(11), Nov 1993.
Since we wrote the paper quite a few people have written with
constructive comments. Nick Nethercote also has a
useful 2-page guide about giving a talk.
How to write a good research paper
"How to write a good research paper", Simon Peyton Jones.
I gave this talk at the Technical University of Vienna in October 2004.
There isn't a paper about it, only the talk:
How to write a good research proposal
"How to write a good research proposal", Simon Peyton Jones and Alan Bundy.
Other resources
Finally, here are some pointers to other advice I have found useful,
though Google will find you a lot more besides.
- The Navigators Research Book of Style is a slide deck from the Navigators research group at the University of Lisbon. It covers choosing a research topic, doing research, and writing and submitting a paper.
- Research tips (including how to do research, how to write and present a paper, how to design a poster, how to review, etc), by Sylvia Miksch
-
Notes on presenting theses, edited by Aaron Sloman, gives useful guidelines and ideas for PhD students writing their thesis.
-
Chris O'Leary's essays about writing an "elevator pitch". This stuff, especially the
list of attributes in the "Elevator pitch 101" page, is very relevant to writing a
good grant proposal.
- Guide for preparation and publication of abstracts and
A scrutiny of the abstract, both by Kenneth Landes in Geological Notes.
These short notes give guidance about writing the abstract of your paper. (Both require
a DjVu viewer which you can get from LizardTech.)
- Norman Ramsey's notes about his
class on Technical Writing.
- Mathematical Writing,
by Donald E. Knuth et al. The first three
sections constitute a minicourse on technical writing: only eight pages
long. The time to read it will repay itself many times over.
- How to Write Mathematics, by PR Halmos.
- Gian-Carlo Rota's excellent talk
Ten lessons I wish I had been taught, which, among other things,
has a bit to say about giving a talk.
- David Patterson's talk
How to have a bad career in research/academia has many wise
things to say on a related topic.
- Mark Leone's page
has a good collection of links to other
resources.
- Papers about measurement: