We’re presenting our research to a sort of audience. Our audience includes the Computer Science academics, our eventual research sponsors and the general population. With many papers being published everyday the difference in whether our research reaches its audience can be in our research presentation or structure.
It is tricky to find any structure that will please all. However, there are many tools that we got at the lectures and exercises that can help us getting closer to that goal. I got pleased to add to my list of tools two new tips that I want to share in this post.
Firstly, one rich source of structuring ideas are Call for Papers. They provide updated lists of relevant topics and also templates with specific and helpful guidelines to each session of our article. Even if I am far far away from publishing a research article on those journals/conferences I look forward to use their Call for Papers to get structuring ideas.
In second place, we had one guest presentation about LaTeX. It was really good. I must confess though that I am yet much attached to word processors’ magic, but as I learn more about LaTeX I am getting awareness of its aim on keeping our papers out of common errors.
Some Call for Papers I am using
Currently my research area of interest are Information Systems for Development and Instructional Design. To be familiarised with a good paper structure I selected one Journal and one Conference in those areas: IST-Africa and IFETS.
Some Technical Stuff
As I was eagerly curious to try LaTeX I took some time to investigate it after the short training we had. As a sort of “Hello TeX!” I started to transform the paper templates I downloaded in .doc format into TeX files.
Briefly speaking, Tex is just a markup language to structure our research article blocks. We are free to choose any text editor to entry the content. Wikipedia has an entry comparing several TeX editors. Considering that entry, I’ve chosen TeXlipse plugin for eclipse for two reasons. Because it passes in all tests being analysed on Wikipedia and I am already familiar with eclipse interface.
The installation was easy for me. After downloading the MiKTeX-based distribution, I added the TeXlipse Eclipse Plugin and it was ready to run.
My impressions after first ‘Hello TeX’ article
I can’t have yet a final decision on pros and cons of LaTeX because my contact with it was very brief (e.g. I didn’t try BibTeX). Positive aspects that I got using TeXlipse consists mainly of the separation between appearance and content in the TeX file. And I found interesting libraries and tags that make easy to generate usual sections like Abstract or Authors’ names and Section numbering and even Table of Contents. However, I am still not sure if as the article grows the tags on the text don’t make it distracting the creative writing process.
There are features that I look forward to find as I try to use TeX in my research. One of them is a kind of version control. The other is the possibility to use on-line editors of TeX (integration with Google Docs would be amazing 🙂 )
Bellow you can find screenshots of the TeX file I created and here the poor output pdf.
