Preparing a Conference Paper
I have been writing a little less on my website recently as I have been preparing a conference paper for presentation at the end of the month. Actually, I’m writing two of them, so twice the workload, twice the stress – twice the reward, I guess. Any academic will be required to, or should at some stage in their career, attend a conference and make a presentation on their work.
Conferences are perfect occasions to network with others in your field. You have the opportunity to present your work, and receive good feedback. The ultimate aim of any conference paper is using it as a foundation to build upon for journal articles. But rather than prepare just any conference paper and then re-write it for a journal with extra content, why not do it all at once.
This is what I am doing at the minute. I have two papers to present. One on my PhD work which has been completed, and one on the work I am currently contracted to do. The great thing about the conference is that my papers are optional. Okay, you’re probably wondering, why the hell are you giving yourself more work? The simple answer is academic gold.
The conference I will be attending allows authors to submit papers which are automatically considered for journal publication. In academia, journal publications are much more critically reviewed. Therefore, in this line of a career, to progress, your publications are your steps of a ladder. Your academic gold, if you will, to greater things.
Right now I have the papers written. And I want to share with you the work effort required to write an paper that will hopefully be accepted to a journal.
The key point of journal articles is to document novel research that adds contributions to the existing knowledge in your field. This contribution can be as simple as a different approach, or different train of thought, or interpretation of results. So when you are creating something new, it does not necessarily have to be completely novel – this seldom happens nowadays given the wealth of knowledge we have already uncovered.
When you write up the paper, its structure must be like that of a thesis or report. It will contain an abstract, list of symbols, introduction, existing knowledge, methodology and approach, results, discussion and conclusions.
Take for example the work I’m presenting on my PhD. The paper presents the findings of the prediction of the aerodynamics of a projectile using a new control method. There has been some work done on similar projectiles using the same control method. So what’s new?
On a very basic level, I am using a different geometry and different solver. However, of much more use, I am using the predictions to a much deeper level than has been used to date. Much of the current research has been experimental. My work is based on numerical prediction, and is therefore addressing a gap in the current knowledge. To reflect this, my paper presents a number of different results which I have not found in any existing literature.
It is important to document everything so that anyone reading the article should be able to make use of your data and hopefully progress their research. However, there is a fine balance in research in presenting sufficient data to contribute to journals, as well as restrict sufficient data to preserve your intellectual property rights. After all, you don’t want to be publishing how you have come up with some fantastic new approach to something that can save people millions, and you loose out on the credit.