Informatics Research Methodologies
Paper Rewriting

Here are the links to the materials you will need for this piece of coursework:

In this coursework, each student must rewrite a short research paper. During the paper review coursework you read and criticised between one and four Informatics research papers. Your task is to pick one of these papers and rewrite it, addressing the criticisms you made in your review and any further faults you have discovered since you submitted your review. Your revised paper should be 8-12 pages long.

The paper rewriting coursework is an assessable component of the module carrying 40% of the total mark. Between 15 and 30 hours are allocated to it. The mark will be based on your revised paper, which should be submitted electronically by 4pm on Thursday of week 11 of semester 1 (i.e. 1st December 2011), as a pdf file.

 submit irm 5 <filename> 

The lecturer will fill in a pro forma giving feedback and a mark to each student by Monday of week 1, Block 3 (i.e. 9th January 2012). Note that the mark awarded is provisional and must be confirmed by the Board of Examiners.

Skills to be Developed

The paper writing is designed to help you develop the following skills:

Supplementing the Paper

Your criticism of the original paper will almost certainly have identified various inadequacies or omissions. These inadequacies or omissions might be in: the evidence for any claims, the related work, the explanation of systems or experiments, etc. You will want to rectify these errors in your rewritten paper. This may require you to do some research, for instance, discovering related work. In some cases, however, it may not be possible to do this without redoing the original research, which is clearly outwith the scope of this coursework. In these cases, you will, therefore, have to invent the missing information. For instance, you may need to make up some missing experimental data! Making up data would normally be regarded as scientific fraud, so is not something you should ever do again. But in this case, it seems unavoidable. Please mark any cases of invention in your rewritten paper by adding a \footnote{...} to explain what you have done.

Latex Template

I have provided the Latex template for research papers, which you should download, complete, format to postscript and submit electronically. Note that the document style is set to 10 point and a4wide. You should not modify this or use other tricks to squeeze more text into your 12 page limit.

Use the following conventions:

If the scope of one of these indicators is ambiguous, then use changebars to delinate its scope.

Alan Bundy


Home : Teaching : Courses : Irm 

Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, Scotland, UK
Tel: +44 131 651 5661, Fax: +44 131 651 1426, E-mail: school-office@inf.ed.ac.uk
Please contact our webadmin with any comments or corrections. Logging and Cookies
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright © The University of Edinburgh