How to Coordinate Research Paper Projects

Joining a Research Project

When joining a research project, or starting one, first make sure that everyone on the team has the same answers to these questions:

• What is the objective of the project?
• Are there any concrete goals or benchmarks? If not, when will they be set, and by whom?
• Who is leading the project?
• What is the order of the author list?
• What is your responsibility on the team?
• What is everyone else’s responsibility on the team?
• How long is each part of the project expected to take?

Inviting Members to a Research Project

Steps for inviting new members on the research project:

1. Update the answers to the questions above
2. Check that everyone on the team is still in sync with the answers without the new contributor
3. Propose new answers to the questions above.
4. Get explicit OKs to updated answers for the following questions from each current contributor:
   • New order of author list
   • New responsibility of everyone on the team
   • If everyone on the author list has agreed to the new member and plan of work, discuss the answers with the new member before they start contributing

Submitting a Research Paper to a Conference

1. At start of project:
   • Write the abstract.
   • Write the list of scientific contributions.
   • Write the evaluation section as if you had completed the project.
   • Iterate on the above until you cannot find obvious flaws in the reasoning.
   • Double check all of the above with everyone involved. It is important to make sure that people aren’t just nodding, and that they are fully aligned. Any miscommunication here may lead to larger problems down the road.
2. Early in the project:
   • Try and set some time estimates for completion of engineering work.
   • Find a conference date after the completion of the project. It will be useful to have a date set early to not have a completely open bound on the work, but the date can shift up or down depending on how good the estimate was for the work completed. The objective is to make a significant scientific contribution, not to crank out papers.
3. Throughout the project:
   • Regularly check that everyone is still aligned on the questions above. They might change, it’s just important to make sure that everyone’s aligned.
4. Once the core experiments have been run:
   • Check conference registration and submission dates.
   • Make plan of action for paper writing, making it clear which section of the paper is whose responsibility The earlier there is a full draft of the paper, the more cycles there will be to review it, the higher quality it’ll be, so getting a complete paper draft is more important than polishing a single section before starting another one.
5. Registration and submission: Get the submission emails for all coauthors. When registering the paper, make sure that all co-authors have the ability to add conflicts and otherwise modify the submission. Regularly upload paper draft to website, it can be amended as many times as necessary.

Writing