Description of assignments
Assignment 1 (worth 60% final mark):
Write a 2,000 words paper for a conference based on the student’s own research (worth 60% of the final grade) This paper must be new and must not have been submitted to another class or already written as part of research work. The target audience is an averagely educated person who is not necessarily an expert in your field. Therefore, clarity in the argument, structure and language used is fundamental. Please make sure you format the paper with the exact specifications for the chosen conference.
In addition, please include an explanation of where this extended abstract would be submitted for publication and any other relevant information for context must be included (this should not exceed 200 words). In this short statement, also include total word count of paper.
This short paper is like an extended abstract – An extended abstract is a research paper whose ideas and significance can be understood in less than an hour. An extended abstract is not simply a long abstract. An extended abstract should contain references, comparisons to related work, analysis of data and other details expected in a research paper. Many conferences ask for an extended abstract rather than a full paper. See the following link for example for advice on writing an extended abstract: http://www.sigsoft.org/conferences/pughadvice.htm. Please discuss with your supervisor if this is not clear. Here are examples of extended abstracts, but you may want to find one from your own field:
http://www.autodiff.org/ad04/abstracts/Grote.pdf (1715 words)
http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~galk/Publications/Papers/fss97social.pdf (2496 words) Remember, a good paper:
- it is not just descriptive
- it is critical and analytical
- ideally it should argue a case in a progressive fashion
- it should include original ideas of your own
- it must make explicit links between the text and the references listed at the end (use the Harvard system of (author, year) please)
- it must include a relevant title linked to your argument (not just “assignment 1”!) and a complete and correctly done list of references
The length of the short paper is 2,000 words. This is both the number of words to aim for (i.e. a paper that is just 1,000 words long is too short) but also a strictly imposed upper limit (journals and conferences may reject papers just because they are over the word limit). Word count is for the whole paper, including references, title, author’s name and affiliation, tables and figures. Therefore the paper cannot have an excessive amount of references if that would affect too much reduced content.
Please note that duplication is also not allowed. It is not allowed for example to submit an assignment where 40% of the writing matches exactly a piece of work done by the student for another class or degree.
