Common Mistakes¶

Paper reads like a report
Paper just states background technology or what others have already stated
Paper fails to address a specific research problem (i.e., a problem that requires extensive research to find an answer / solution for) (→ if the extend of research is considerbly low, this is a clear indicator that the topic and problem requires more thoughts)
Research Questions are formulated too broadly / too general e.g. How can context be modelled with technology xyz? Those questions can not be answered directly and just provide heuristic answers They do not provide any clues about the extend of quality of a proposed solution (e.g. you can not say whether an approach is “better” than another or in which aspects an approach exceeds another one)
Paper fails to comply with the de-facto standard structure of scientific papers
No consideration of the state-of-the-art (SOTA)
Paper’s contributions are not put in relevance/relation to the SOTA
Fail to discuss the extent (quality/effectiveness) of the contributions wrt. the research questions
Missing evaluation or justification of the results wrt. the extent to which they help in answering the RQs
Missing discussion of evaluation results
Neglection of results published in form of primary literature ()
Contributions are not clearly visible (→ readers can only guess of what the authors have achieved and how the contributions extend the SOTA)
…

Do not start with the talk’s agenda (→ each scientific talk follows a standardized agenda; there is no need to make that explicit)
start by motivating the problem the work provides contributions for
more to follow…

Here is what you should do if your task is to develop an algorithm / module / component / system etc.

do not just develop it and think everything is fine (from a methodological point of view it is not; it is not even heuristiaclly valid)
Put the problem to the front, i.e., make the problem your starting point
Implement different approaches (that all solve or contribute towards solving the problem – or parts of it)
Then define KPIs that help you to assess the quality of a solution and that allow to compare the different solutions based on the extent to which they solve (or help solving) the problem
Conduct the analysis and compare the different approaches (methodology: comparative analysis)
Present and discuss your findings

Letztes Update: 17. September 2024