IEEE Professional Communication Society Newsletter • ISSN 1539-3593 • Volume 52, Number 2 • February 2008
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Write It Right

 

Considerations for Experimental Work

by Judy Goldsmith and Robert H. Sloan

Last month, we discussed the mechanics of developing a document. In this final installment, we discuss experimental work and conclude our series.

Many software engineers perform experimental research. Here, we briefly discuss a matter that has implications for writing, although it is first and foremost an ethical issue: how to conduct experimental work.

The proper order for conducting experimental work is the same as the proper order for presenting it:

  1. Write down your hypothesis.
  2. Design an experiment that will test this hypothesis.
  3. Run your experiment.
  4. Evaluate your hypothesis on the experiment's data.
  5. Say if your experiment confirmed your hypothesis, or if your hypothesis refuted your hypothesis.

It is particularly important to say when your hypothesis has been refuted. Alas, it is often impossible to get negative experimental results published. This is really unfortunate, because negative experimental results can be of great value to other researchers. (Perhaps the research community needs to start a new Journal of Failed Experiments.)

Kitchenham et al. (2002) have written a good overview on conducting empirical work in software engineering that encompasses experimental work, as well as such things as case studies.

Conclusions

Good writing enhances communication. We have touched on the mechanics of organization, writing, and rewriting. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of careful reading and revision of your own work before submission. It will decrease the number of editorial passes others need to do, and will increase the chances that your papers will be accepted in conferences, read, and referenced. Perhaps most importantly, people tend to recommend well-written papers to their friends and colleagues. If the point of writing papers is to have them read, then good writing is one means of increasing the chance that they will be.

Note that, once upon a time, journals employed copy editors, whose job it was to correct grammatic and other errors. Due to budget cuts throughout the publishing industry, copyeditors are rare. You cannot assume that anyone else will fix your writing. It is up to you to get it right.

We hope that this series has been useful to you, both as an introduction to the basics of good writing and as a reference. It does not replace the other references cited here or elsewhere, but merely supplements them.

References
ACM policy and procedures on plagiarism, October 2005.

Bovik, H. Q.; Goldsmith, J. Q.; Klapper, A. Q.; and M. Q. Littman. (April 2003) "Markov indecision processes: A formal model of decisionmaking under extreme confusion", Journal of Machine Learning Gossip, pages 1-9.

The Chicago Manual of Style. (2003) University of Chicago Press, 15th edition.

Dupr´e, L. (1998) BUGS in Writing, A Guide to Debugging Your Prose. Addison Wesley Professional.

Gibaldi, J. (2003) MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. MLA Book Publications, 6th edition.

Gordon, K. E. (1993) The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager and the Doomed. Pantheon.

Gordon, K. E. (2003) The New Well Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. Mariner Books.

Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences. (1998) SIAM, second edition.


Johnson, J. (July 2005) On mathematical writing. Accessed on October 18, 2006.

Kitchenham, B.; Pfleeger, S. L.; Pickard, L.; Jones, P., Hoaglin, D.; Emam, K. E.; & Rosenberg, J. (2002) "Preliminary guidelines for empirical research in software engineering", IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 28(8):721-734.

Knuth, D. E.; Larrabee, T. L.; & Roberts, P. M. (1989) Mathematical Writing. Mathematical Association of America. Reprint (with corrections) of Technical Report 1193, Stanford University Computer Science Department, 1988.

Parberry, I. (1994) "A guide for new referees in theoretical computer science". Information and Computation, 112(1):96-116.

Shaw, M. (2003) Writing good software engineering research papers: Minitutorial. In Proc. 25th Int'l Conf. Software Eng. (ICSE 2003), pages 726-736.

Stone, H. S. (December 1992) "Copyrights and author responsibilities". IEEE Computer, pages 46-51.

Strunk, W. & White, E. B. (1999) The Elements of Style. Longman, 4th edition. The original 1918 edition of Strunk is available online at URL http://www.bartleby.com/141/.

Thomson Scientific. Science citation index. http://scientific.thomson.com/products/sci/

Voice of America. (23 August 2006) "Ohio University accuses engineering graduates of plagiarism". VOA News, August 2006. Downloaded October 11, 2006 from URL
http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/archive/2006-08/2006-08-23-voa4.cfm.

Zobel, J. (2004) Writing for Computer Science. Springer, 2nd edition.

 

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Judy Goldsmith is a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include decision making under uncertainty; automation of information elicitation; preference elicitation, representation, and aggregation; computational learning theory, and structural complexity.

Robert H. Sloan is a professor (and acting department head) of computer science at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His research interests include application of computer science theory and algorithms to problems from artificial intelligence, especially machine learning ("computational learning theory") and knowledge representation;computer security, especially access control; and computer science education.

 

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