Everything I learned about writing research papers I learned after 11 years of higher education, and more importantly, after the 205 pages and 55 minutes of my Ph.D Thesis Defense. For the first time in my academic life, four accomplished researchers reviewed my enormous thesis document, and provided incredibly useful feedback about academic writing style and experimental structure in typical academic research paper.
Typically, academic writing is a sink or swim affair. If you have a really good advisor, they might actually read your work, and even provide feedback about your papers. But in terms of numbers, the bulk of the feedback budding academic computer scientists get about how to present their work comes from (usually) rejected conference papers. The peer review process means that there will be 2-4 anonymous researchers who read you eight page double-column formatted paper and critique your paper. Academics have big egos, particularly about research ideas, so on first read, this paper reviews can feel very much like reading a Youtube comment thread -- in other words, soul-crushing and depressing.
Over the years, I, like probably many academics, have developed a technique for dealing with the post-review-reading depression, that usually involves going drinking with friends and letting the contents of the reviews sit for 24 hours before trying to find the good ideas within the criticism. It's a great life skill, say some. It's helped me develop a thick skin, say others. I assume both of these perspectives also involve crying on the inside. The worst is when the comments make it clear that the reviewer has only read your abstract and not the contents of the paper, because then you feel righteous, but even the accepted papers with be sprinkled with these kinds of things.
In the end, it is important to be humble. The reader is never wrong, as my PhD advisor said. If I were to have written more clearly there would have been fewer misunderstandings, and perhaps they would have chosen to dig deeper into the paper. And now that I review more papers than I submit (11 sitting on my desk at the moment, metaphorically speaking, relative to the two I submitted in September), I can see things from both sides.
But one thing that is clear is the average rising academic is woefully unprepared about the process of writing. I found it fascinating that at the point that I already had secured an assistant professorship, that I had already written (the original draft) and orally presented my dissertation, that THAT was the point at which my mentors acknowledged that I was truly committed to this process and took the time to review the secrets behind the curtain that had, in some ways, been eluding me for so many years. In my next post, I will present their wisdom...
