Key Points and Paper Outlines

We have consistently found that often students don’t see the “big picture” of their paper and don’t have a good understanding of the sources’ contributions up until preparing their presentation at the end of the semester. This intermediate deadline is designed to help students get a better understanding of their work earlier in the semester.

Key points of your paper

Academic papers tend to contribute at least one new thing to further work in an area, and the authors usually describe their contributions by situating their work compared to other (previous) work in the area. Key points of your paper show your understanding of contributions of your sources.

They may be written as a bullet list or 2-4 paragraphs. You should answer the following questions:

• What main problem(s) or question(s) does the research address? Be specific about the important context or assumptions. For example, are the approaches applicable to centralized networks, or peer-to-peer networks? Can you effectively train the systems on smaller data sets, or do you need hundreds of thousands of classified training instances? Clearly position it within the areas of the discipline. For example, if one of your papers is in machine learning, are their algorithms unsupervised or supervised? Are their parallel algorithms intended to be run on a large distributed cluster or on GPUs?
• What are the key contributions of each of your main sources? Describe what each approach assumes as initially given and what it produces or provides. Essentially what are the paper’s “inputs” and what are its subsequent “outputs”?
• How are the main sources related to each other? Does one approach extend another? Is it possible to compare different approaches, or are their assumptions different enough that they are essentially apples and oranges?
• What is the state of the research that you are describing: Has it been implemented? Tested? If yes, do they provide appropriate and detailed result data? Can you summarize and share those results?
• What background material will you need to present in order for your audience to understand the research? What do you assume your audience already knows?
• What do you see as the biggest challenges in understanding the sources and how do you plan on addressing them? What resources would you use? If there are multiple challenging subtopics, perhaps you can focus on one of them. Make sure to discuss this with your adviser and develop a plan.

Some items may not apply directly to papers in all areas. If that’s the case with your sources, find analogous questions that are applicable. Your advisor and the instructor will be happy to help you.

If you have any questions, please talk to the instructor and/or your advisor.

Outline of your paper

The outline of your paper describes the structure of your paper. This should include at least sections and subsections, along with a brief (one sentence) description of each. You should also mention the key sources you’ll use for each section/subsection. You may want to expand the outline out to the level of paragraphs (or parts of subsections); this is particularly useful for areas that you’re uncertain about or which you think will be challenging.

Don’t just give us five roman numerals with vague titles like “Introduction”, “Background”, “Thing 1”, “Thing 2”, and “Conclusion”. That tells both you and us nothing useful, and does nothing to expose or address challenges and questions. It’s easy to not give this outlining the time it’s due, but time spent here will definitely pay off later.

Don’t forget to include your paper title and the bibliography in the outline.

samplekeypointsandoutline.pdf: A sample key points submission (note: more questions were added in Spring 2022)