Paper Writing Guide

A guide for writing technical papers, from Sandeep Chinchali's UT Austin Swarm Lab.

The main guide is a LaTeX document that walks through how to structure and write each section of a technical paper (introduction, problem statement, solution approach, experiments, discussion, etc.). It doubles as a template you can adapt for your own papers.

Before going through the paper writing guide, please skim through the checklist that I recommend for a streamlined submission and publication process.

• General Checklist for Sandeep's Papers
• GenAI Usage Acknowledgment — template certification email and checklist for appropriate GenAI/LLM use in manuscript preparation.
• Compendium of Common Paper Errors
• Example paper (NeurIPS 2021) — an example of how the LaTeX files should be structured.
• Shared bibliography — the lab's shared .bib files. See the General Checklist below for how to use this bib file.
• Swarm-Visualization — Plots are key in conveying the message. I recommend following this particular plotting style so it's easier for me to review, and in general, to convey the key results more succinctly.

Contents

• Chinchali.PaperWritingGuide.2021.pdf — the compiled guide (start here).
• Chinchali.PaperWritingGuide.2021.tex + sections/ — LaTeX source for the guide, with per-section advice.
• checklist/, ref/, latex_fig/, pics/ — supporting files, references, and figures.

Building

Prerequisites: a LaTeX distribution providing pdflatex and bibtex (e.g. TeX Live), plus the bbm font package. On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-recommended texlive-fonts-extra

The IEEEtran document class is vendored in this repo (IEEEtran.cls), so no separate install is needed for it.

Then build the PDF with:

make

This runs pdflatex → bibtex → pdflatex (×2) and produces Chinchali.PaperWritingGuide.2021.pdf. Run make clean to remove build artifacts.