An okay discussion, but it falls entirely flat on its face in a very important place: related work.
What is the point of related work? Notionally twofold: to argue that there are people that care about what you're doing (because they're asking similar questions), and to argue that people haven't done the work yet.
But in reality there's a third reason: to help tell the story.
Writing a paper is telling a story. The story of an interesting problem, and how you went about solving it.
Simon thinks that related work should go at the end of the paper. Reading his slides makes it clear to me that really the issue is that he doesn't know what to do with related work; it seems to be an anachronism to him that he has to put somewhere so it might as well stick it at the end where no one will notice. He also seems to have missed that related work helps answer the "It's an interesting problem" and "It's an unsolved problem" sections of his story -- both of which he's got thrown up in the "Conveying the idea" slide. This tells me that he's likely not written a good related work section.
Related work is motivation. It's part of the story. It should be relatively up front. The story should go like this:
- Introduction: Here is a problem
- Related Work: Other people have gone after this problem and have failed to figure it out, or danced around it. People care about it.
- Approach: Here is how I solve the problem
- Details: Here is what I did
- Discussion: Here is what the results were
- Conclusions and Further Work: Here's what I'm going to do next.
Related work is motivation. It's part of the story.
It depends on the paper -- in many cases, I think that a paper can be adequately motivated in the introduction, without explicitly enumerating all the potential related work. Given that most people stop reading quite early into a paper, I think there's a lot to be said for getting to the "Good Stuff" quickly -- and the related work is rarely the "Good Stuff".
Perhaps related work is more important for incremental, technical results: "problem A is important, B and C tried to solve it but their solutions were imperfect for reasons D and E, and therefore we propose F." But when you're, say, describing a new piece of systems software, the related work is less likely to be an essential part of the motivation for the paper.
I'm using Konqueror on KDE on SuSE and it comes up fine in the browser directly. Your link appears to me to add an extra layer. Maybe I'm missing something.
Not important, just confused. Situation normal ...
What is the point of related work? Notionally twofold: to argue that there are people that care about what you're doing (because they're asking similar questions), and to argue that people haven't done the work yet.
But in reality there's a third reason: to help tell the story.
Writing a paper is telling a story. The story of an interesting problem, and how you went about solving it.
Simon thinks that related work should go at the end of the paper. Reading his slides makes it clear to me that really the issue is that he doesn't know what to do with related work; it seems to be an anachronism to him that he has to put somewhere so it might as well stick it at the end where no one will notice. He also seems to have missed that related work helps answer the "It's an interesting problem" and "It's an unsolved problem" sections of his story -- both of which he's got thrown up in the "Conveying the idea" slide. This tells me that he's likely not written a good related work section.
Related work is motivation. It's part of the story. It should be relatively up front. The story should go like this:
- Introduction: Here is a problem
- Related Work: Other people have gone after this problem and have failed to figure it out, or danced around it. People care about it.
- Approach: Here is how I solve the problem
- Details: Here is what I did
- Discussion: Here is what the results were
- Conclusions and Further Work: Here's what I'm going to do next.