Zachary Tatlock / Paper Recipe

The point of writing a paper is to help others. After reading your paper, someone should know how to do something they couldn’t do before or have some idea for how to approach a problem. You should know what they will or should do differently going forward.

A great paper has to have 4 big components:

• Problem
  • No one will care about anything you’ve done till they care about the problem you’re trying to solve.
• Opportunity
  • How good could things be if you solved this problem?
• Insight
  • You must show some simple, clever insight that makes the problem “fall apart”.
  • The insight also has to transcend the particular problem and have clear applications outside this paper.
• Claims
  • You must make concrete claims about the insight, e.g., how much better it is than SOTA.
• Evidence
  • You must provide evidence to support the claims.
  • For “systems papers” this probably means tables and graphs.
  • For “theory papers” this probably theorems and proofs.