Here is a list of common errors encountered when revising paper drafts. Please check these when you write papers (before you send them for me to check).

  • Write the abstract first. Think of the keywords that you want to include in the title. Then think of a few candidate titles for your paper. Discuss these with your co-authors.

  • Introduction: List up the things that you want to mention in the intro (same goes for all sections).

    • What is the problem?
    • Why is it important to solve it?
    • What are the challenges?
    • How does the proposed method overcome those? (briefly explain the proposed method and give pointers to the corresponding sections in the paper)
    • What experiments did you do to evaluate the proposed method? How were the results?

  • It is a good practice to end the introduction with a summary of the contributions. The Area Chair (AC) will use that to write a meta-review, if they want to accept your paper.

  • Run a spell-checker

  • Use a single ~ (tilde) before \cite command such that you have a space between the opening bracket of a citation reference and the remainder of the sentence.

  • Define all acronyms when you use them the first time. Second time onwards use the acronym you already defined. Acronym package is a handy tool for this.

  • Check that the font size in your figures are not too small to read. It is a good practice to use the same (or at least similar) font types in your figures as the rest of the paper.

  • Provide detailed and informative captions to your figures and tables such that the reader could understand what is shown in the figure/table even without having to read the body text of the paper. (bad example: Figure 1: Overview of the method)

  • Use table, figure labels that are informative. For example, tbl1 is a poor choice for referring to a Table (which might not be the first table in the paper after several edits). tbl:similarity-results is a better naming, which is more informative.

  • Common word usage mistakes (like –> such as, utilise –> use)

  • If you are performing any statistical significance tests to check whether your proposed method is significantly outperforms a previously proposed method (or a baseline), remember to mention the level of significane (i.e. alpha < 0.01 or 0.05 etc.) (or alternatively the confidence levels corresponding to 99% or 95%) as well as the name of the test you performed. If you do not do any statistical significance tests then do not mention the term significant in the paper.

  • If you can spend an hour to revise a section, include a figure, a table etc. that would save 5mins of the reviewer/readers time spent on your paper, then do it!