BASIC TYPES OF DOCUMENTS Technical/research articles and papers

Technical/research articles and papers

The preparation of a scientific paper has almost nothing to do with literary skill. It is a question of organisation.(Robert A. Day, How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper)

Technical/research articles and papers

organized in the IMRAD format Introduction, Methods, Results And Discussion.

Introductionpresents the works and results of previously published studies, moving from general to specific informationanswer the following questions: What is the problem? Why is it interesting and important? Why is it hard? Why hasn't it been solved before? What are the key components of my approach and results? also include any specific limitations. In the last part of the introduction, state objectives and hypothesesvery important to cite sources

The Methods or Materialspresents in a narrative form the steps taken in the experimentthe narrative should be clear enough for another researcher to be able to duplicate your work Performance Experiments (measure sensitivity to parameters, scalability, showing absolute or relative performance to previous approaches).

The Results

sets up notation and terminology, includes algorithms, system descriptions, new language constructs, analyses, etc. It is important for the reader to understand where the material is going.

Discussionthe author explains and interprets the results obtained from the point of view of other published results included in the introduction, in relationship with the objectives set and to the hypotheses presents problems encountered in detail Future Work (sets new directions) is also included here

The Conclusions and The Acknowledgements The Conclusions (in general, a short summarising paragraph of the entire work).The Acknowledgements

Bibliography and Citations all citations needed in an alphabetical order, complete and consistentcite recent documentsDo not just copy randomly entries from various lists or sites. Do not include ISBN number; avoid long URLs

Things to Avoidtoo much motivational material describing unnecessary and obvious details. spelling errorsarial and other sans-serif fonts.three reasons are enough -- and they should be described very briefly

Abstracts as overviews of articles, accompanying the articlesas summaries of Ph.D. theses or dissertations, usually put in the introductionas components of larger reports, also called executive summaries

Abstracts

between 200 and 500 words descriptive or informative

Parts of the abstract Motivation - briefly about the importance of your work, the difficulty of the field and your works potential impact Problem statement - what exact problem you approach and what sphere of application it hasApproach or methodology - what experimental methods and approaches you used and what your main findings areResults - what solution resulted after the use of the methodMajor conclusions - to what extent your results are general, or specific for a particular case.)

Grammar elements in abstractsuse of third person, passive, past tense and lack of negativesadjectives (if any) do not take superlativessentences avoid repetition and meaningless expression However, verb tenses vary with the nature of information: statements about the content of the document and about the findings are in the present tense. Statements about the steps and processes of the research are in past tense.

Grammar elements in abstractsVerbs used in present/past simple, active voice:the results show/establish/suggest or showed/established/suggestedthe main idea is thatthe focus is onshows/introduces/concludes/investigates/analyses/discussesVerbs used in present/past simple passive voice:it is proposedit is identifiedit is argued that

Examples A multiprocessor scheduling scheme is presented for supporting hierarchical containers that encapsulate sporadic soft and hard real-time tasks. In this scheme, each container is allocated a specified bandwidth, which it uses to schedule its children. This scheme is novel in that, with only soft real-time tasks, no utilization loss is incurred when provisioning containers, even in arbitrarily deep hierarchies. Presented experiments show that the proposed scheme performs well compared to conventional real-time scheduling techniques that do not provide container isolation.

Examples

We have developed an automatic abstract generation system for Japanese expository writings based on rhetorical structure extraction. The system first extracts the rhetorical structure, the compound of the rhetorical relations between sentences, and then cuts out less important parts in the extracted structure to generate an abstract of the desired length. Evaluation of the generated abstract showed that it contains at maximum 74% of the most important sentences of the original text. The system is now utilized as a text browser for a prototypical interactive document retrieval system.

The User Manualto give assistance to people using a particular system how to assemble, how to use, how to fix a system

The User Manualtutorials, training manuals used as textbooks, operators manuals, service manuals, maintenance manuals for semiskilled technicians, and repair manuals for service technicians performing extensive repairs

The User Manualinstallation manuals, instruction manuals, operations manuals (explaining how equipment works in theory and practice and including diagrams, blueprints, tables of operating data, specifications), sales manuals (containing product specifications, pricing and other information for sales persons), system documentation (showing how the system is designed, what components it has) and computer users manual

The User ManualThe sections of a user guide contain:A cover pageA title page and copyright pageA preface (with details of related documents and information on how to reach various aspects in the guide)A contents pageA troubleshooting section (on errors and problems that could occur and how to fix them)A Frequently Asked Questions componentWhere to find further help A glossary and an index (in the case of very large documents).

Technical reports types of reportsperiodic report primary researchannual reports progress reports research reports recommendation reports feasibility reports technical background reports

Tips for report writingunderstand your objectiveskeep it short, make clear and short sentences, easy to be read by the busy reader; be detailed and factualorganise the text, with headings/subheadings to help the readers find the information relevant start with important information and add additional information with scarcity

Tipsuse a relaxed style, easy to read, rather informal, but professionaluse graphics, sources and data remembering that people trust statistics more than opinions;make your report attractive by sticking to the same fonts (Times New Roman font at 11pt or 12pt), acceptable spacing (usually 1.5) and wide margins as well as right justify.number sections and subsections; Remember that each section should be structured as follows: Tell...

Specification (specs) sheet

cover a wide range of products and equipment, including softwareare written by engineers, technicians, programmers or other technical specialists. According to Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts, (2001, p. 122), spec sheets are written in teams, are always work-in-progress and need updating as the project changes. requirement specs include the detailed definition of the application of the product, a list with functions and capabilities, and an estimated cost as they mirror the needs of the market for the product in question

Specsfunctional specs -very detailed information of the objectives, methods, system operation, output, file descriptions, calculations, dealing with the capabilities mentioned in the requirement specsdesign specs - all documents relevant for the application or product, interfaces and functions, programming issues, reliability, diagnostic issues, and alterations in progresstest specs add documents related to similar products or applications, testing methods and warnings for the testerend-user specs give information about operating the product or running the application, including features, weaknesses, other characteristics of the products, information on the vendor