Some more points on making your paper reviewer-friendly

Picture the following situation: you as a VIS PC member sit in front of your computer and have to bid on 500 to 600 papers (or maybe even more this year). For each of them you see the title, the keywords the authors have assigned, and the abstract. The list is pre-sorted by your own experience (that you recorded via keywords, just like the authors of the submissions did for their papers), but this sorting is not completely reliable and frequently there are relevant or even highly relevant papers for your expertise that end up low in the list. So ultimately you need to go through all the papers, and see which papers you would like to review, can review, or don’t want to review at all for lack of expertise. You probably make some decisions simply based on the title (so hopefully the authors chose a good and descriptive title), yet for many you need to read the abstract. Now guess what most reviewers are doing (and we are making assumptions here based on our own experience): they are searching each abstract for precisely three words: “In this paper, …” (or similar expressions). The reason is that the sentence or two that start(s) right at this point is/are telling you what this paper is really about. Not the many sentences before that tell you what’s wrong in this world and how important it is that these problems get fixed—you as a PC member are (hopefully) already an expert on these problems that require that we create new and better visual representations and interactive data exploration systems. Unfortunately, these essential sentences are often hidden somewhere in the middle and even occasionally toward the end of the abstract, which makes the PC member’s job quite tedious.

This situation illustrates a tendency that many of us have to write our technical papers and parts or them in a WHY-HOW-WHAT fashion:¹WHY do we need to change things, HOW do we do it, and WHAT does this now mean. Yet this structure does not really support the reader who likely wants to learn something new: by the time they get to WHAT you have done they may have lost the motivation because they had to dig through all that WHY this is important (potentially repeating what they already know) and the part on HOW you achieved your contribution (which they will have troubles understanding because they do not know where the whole journey is taking them). A better structure often is to write your paper in a WHAT-WHY-HOW style: start with a clear but brief statement on what you have done, then comes a bigger part on why this is important, and then the glory details on HOW you achieved your contributions.

This structure can apply at different levels of paper writing. For example, the abstract and some part of the introduction often serve the WHAT function, another part of the introduction and the related work section represent the WHY part,² and the remaining core sections of the paper provide the details for the HOW part. But not only for the paper, but also, in particular, for the abstract. We recommend that you start your abstract with one or two clear sentences about WHAT you do, then could come a few sentences on WHY this contribution is important and needed, and then finally the rest of the abstract can talk about HOW you achieved it and your key results. This structure not only makes it much easier for future readers of your paper to remain interested, it also makes it much easier for potential reviewers of your paper to understand what it is about—hopefully convincing the right reviewers to bid on your papers.

Now let’s picture a new situation and assume that the bidding process is finished, and reviewers have been assigned to your paper, who are now reading and evaluating it. Of course, even at this point (we presume) you want to make it as easy as possible for them to understand what you have done, and how innovative and important your contributions are. Let’s assume that the reviewer reads something along the following lines: “The literature was analyzed and a new approach was designed. A tool that creates a suitable visualization was implemented in Python. In the study that was conducted with the tool, each participant was given 10 questions. Sample groups were arranged.” If, as a reviewer, you are like us then you are puzzled. You ask yourself: who analyzed the literature? The authors or some survey they cite? Who designed the new approach? The authors or somebody else (who)? Who actually designed and conducted the experiment? The authors or some external company they haven’t mentioned yet? And who talked to the participants? And so on.

The problem here is that this text was written in what is called passive voice. Many of us have the tendency (or are even taught!) to use passive voice to describe what they did. But for a scientific paper this way of writing often hides the person who is actually acting, making this very point difficult to understand—yet this is precisely what you want to communicate: you the authors realized the important new contributions. A better way to communicate this point is to use what is called active voice, where you clearly state who did what: “We analyzed the literature and designed a new approach. We implemented a tool in Python to create a suitable visualization. We used the tool in a study, in which we gave each participant 10 questions. We arranged sample groups.” Now everything is clear beyond a doubt for your reviewers and for future readers of your paper. And, as an added benefit, you may notice that this way of writing (typically) uses less space than the passive-voice version. But more on space use in papers in a later blog post.

For the time being we hope that these thoughts help you prepare better submissions for this year’s conference, in addition to the previously posted guidelines on how to make your paper reviewer-friendly such as selecting appropriate keywords or providing hyperlinked DOIs for all the references in your paper.