Research Tips for Students by Alcides Fonseca

Although some of these tips are general, there are some quirks that have to with my preferences. But I’ve found most people agree with me.

Read a couple of similar papers in top venues or thesis. Learn the common structure and use it.
Show me the skeleton of the document before writing.
Always give an overview before you go in detail.
Use short and direct sentences. Use (well chosen) connectors between sentences to give a conducting line to the paragraph.
Scientific papers use formal language. Avoid contractions (“I’m”, “it’s”) and too many phrasal verbs.
Have a running example in all your papers.

Create a git repo for each paper/project. Usually I create a repo just for the paper, and the code lives on a different repo, as it can be reused for different papers.
Use LaTeX for the paper. Yes it’s ugly, but at least I don’t have to worry (much) about formatting.
Use bibtex to manage bibliographies. By order of preference, use DBLP, ACM, IEEE and only Google Scholar as a last resource to get the Bibtex key.

Use cleveref and \Cref or \cref instead of \ref to manage references to figures and sections. Use label prefixes: cha:, sec:, subsec:, fig:, lst:, tab:
Use Software~\cite{source_key} to connect the citation with the previous work. Use \citet and \citep accordingly.
Do NOT use minted. It is a PITA.