A blog by Rob J Hyndman 

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Posts Tagged ‘writing’:


Table design

Published on 14 February 2012

Almost every research paper and the­sis in sta­tis­tics con­tains at least some tables, yet stu­dents are rarely taught how to make good tables. While the prin­ci­ples of good graph­ics are slowly becom­ing part of a sta­tis­ti­cal edu­ca­tion (although not an econo­met­rics edu­ca­tion!), the prin­ci­ples of good tables are often ignored. Per­haps peo­ple think they are obvi­ous, although the results I see in papers and the­ses sug­gest otherwise.

 
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What you wish you knew before you started a PhD

Published on 11 November 2011

I asked my research group recently what they wished they had learned before they started work on a PhD. Here are some of the responses.

 
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I’m switching to TeXstudio

Published on 29 March 2011

I’ve hap­pily used WinEdt for all my LaTeX edit­ing for about 15 years and I’ve encour­aged my whole research team to use it. But I’m tired of prob­lems with WinEdt that take up my time.

 
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Authorship ethics

Published on 11 January 2011

With the con­stant pres­sure on aca­d­e­mics to pub­lish research papers, there is a temp­ta­tion for research groups to include “coau­thors” who have not really made any con­tri­bu­tion to the man­u­script. This seems more preva­lent in some fields (e.g., the health sci­ences) than oth­ers. Occa­sion­ally, I am asked to add an author to a paper that has already been accepted for pub­li­ca­tion in the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing. I am very reluc­tant to do this as it is hard to imag­ine how some­one could be left off a paper while it goes through sev­eral revi­sions, only to be remem­bered after the paper is accepted. It looks like a last ditch attempt to get some­one a pub­li­ca­tion rather than a gen­uine research con­tri­bu­tion. Most uni­ver­si­ties now have an author­ship pol­icy. The author­ship pol­icy at Monash Uni­ver­sity includes the fol­low­ing state­ments. Attri­bu­tion of author­ship … in all cases author­ship must be based on mak­ing a sub­stan­tial intel­lec­tual con­tri­bu­tion to the work described and tak­ing sole or joint respon­si­bil­ity for that con­tri­bu­tion or, where appro­pri­ate, the work as a whole. Accord­ingly, author­ship must be based upon a sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tion and respon­si­bil­ity for at least one, and usu­ally more than one, of the fol­low­ing activ­i­ties: Con­cep­tion and design of the project; Analy­sis and inter­pre­ta­tion of research data; Draft­ing

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How to avoid annoying a referee

Published on 22 October 2010

It’s not a good idea to annoy the ref­er­ees of your paper. They make rec­om­men­da­tions to the edi­tor about your work and it is best to keep them happy. There is an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion on stats​.stack​ex​change​.com on this sub­ject. This inspired my own list below. Explain what you’ve done clearly, avoid­ing unnec­es­sary jar­gon. Don’t claim your paper con­tributes more than it actu­ally does. (I ref­er­eed a paper this week where the author claimed to have invented prin­ci­pal com­po­nent analy­sis!) Ensure all fig­ures have clear cap­tions and labels. Include cita­tions to the referee’s own work. Obvi­ously you don’t know who is going to ref­eree your paper, but you should aim to cite the main work in the area. It places your work in con­text, and keeps the ref­er­ees happy if they are the authors. Make sure the cited papers say what you think they say. Sight what you cite! Include proper cita­tions for all soft­ware pack­ages. If you are unsure how to cite an R pack­age, try the com­mand citation(“packagename”). Never pla­gia­rise from other papers — not even sen­tence frag­ments. Use your own words. I’ve ref­er­eed a the­sis which had slabs taken from my own lec­ture notes includ­ing the typos. Don’t pla­gia­rise from your own papers. Either ref­er­ence

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Take note

Published on 17 September 2010

Your best ideas don’t nec­es­sar­ily come while sit­ting at your com­puter ready to type. They might come while play­ing sport, tak­ing a shower, lying in bed, or enjoy­ing din­ner at a restau­rant.  So you always need some­thing to write on to cap­ture the ideas before they float away. For about twenty years I car­ried a lit­tle spi­ral notepad and pen just for this pur­pose. When iPods became pop­u­lar, I named my notepad my “iPad”. Then Apple stole my brand name! Although they were low-​​​​tech, my iPads were extremely effi­cient and func­tional. In an inter­est­ing par­ody, you can now get a real notepad that looks like an iPad or iPhone! (Click on the image below for more infor­ma­tion.) How­ever, I’ve sold out to Apple and use an iPhone, so it makes sense to keep my notes on the iPhone.  But the native notepad app is not so use­ful because it doesn’t sync with my com­puter. I’d like to jot down some ideas and then have them avail­able on my PC with­out any re-​​​​typing. The native iPhone notepad app does sync with MS Out­look but who wants to use that when there is gmail? I’ve tried about half-​​​​a-​​​​dozen note tak­ing apps with sync­ing capa­bil­i­ties and have deleted most of them

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Your name is your brand

Published on 16 September 2010

As a researcher, you want to become known as an expert in your field. You need peo­ple to rec­og­nize your name and asso­ciate it with your research. Con­se­quently, it is impor­tant to be con­sis­tent in the name you use on pub­li­ca­tions. For exam­ple, I could write under “R Hyn­d­man”, “R J Hyn­d­man”, “Rob Hyn­d­man”, “Rob J Hyn­d­man”, etc. I’ve cho­sen the last of these and I try to use it on all pub­li­ca­tions. Unfor­tu­nately, some jour­nals insist on only ini­tials, in which case I become “R J Hyn­d­man”. In other cases, a coau­thor han­dles all the cor­re­spon­dence with the jour­nal and, despite my requests, they just list me as “R Hyn­d­man” or “Rob Hyn­d­man”. So I have not achieved con­sis­tency, but I try. Researchers from coun­tries with more elab­o­rate nam­ing con­ven­tions than the West­ern tra­di­tion will have even more options, and so it is even more impor­tant to aim for con­sis­tency in pub­li­ca­tions. Con­sis­tency is also impor­tant when oth­ers are search­ing for one of your papers. If you have changed your name, or you use two very dif­fer­ent names, then it will be harder for other researchers to find the paper of yours that they are look­ing for. This can be a prob­lem when peo­ple have changed their name at mar­riage,

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More StackExchange sites

Published on 17 July 2010

The Stack­Ex­change site on Sta­tis­ti­cal Analy­sis is about to go into pri­vate beta test­ing. This is your last chance to com­mit if you want to be part of the pri­vate beta test­ing. Don’t worry if you miss out — it will only be a week before it is then open to the pub­lic. There is also a Stack­Ex­change site pro­posal for TeX, LaTeX and friends. Pre­sum­ably that means that most of the LaTeX ques­tions on Stack­Over­flow will then move to this new site. It still needs a cou­ple of hun­dred more peo­ple to com­mit before it can be launched, so if you are inter­ested in LaTeX, please com­mit to being part of it. Another site pro­posal that may be of inter­est to read­ers of this blog is the one on Eng­lish lan­guage usage. A few pro­pos­als are already open to the pub­lic for beta test­ing. One that I’ve been using a lit­tle is Web Apps which is use­ful for ques­tions on Gmail, Google reader, Word­Press, etc.

 
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The falling standard of English in research

Published on 15 July 2010

It seems that most jour­nals no longer do any seri­ous copy-​​​​editing, and the stan­dard of Eng­lish is falling. Today I was read­ing an arti­cle from the Euro­pean Jour­nal of Oper­a­tional Research, which is a sup­pos­edly a good OR jour­nal (cur­rent impact fac­tor over 2). Take this for an exam­ple from the first page of this paper: If the learned pat­terns are unsta­ble, the learn­ing tools would pro­duce incon­sis­tent con­cepts. To over­come this dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion, we employed arti­fi­cial neural net­works (ANNs, NNs) for help­ing the learn­ing task. NNs have attracted a lot of atten­tion form aca­d­e­mic researchers and indus­trial prac­ti­tion­ers because of the pow­er­ful flex­i­ble non­lin­ear mod­el­ing capa­bil­ity ([Balestrassi et al., 2009], [Bellini and Figa-​​​​Talamanca, 2005] and [Qi and Zhang, 2001]). It is the main rea­son for their pop­u­lar­ity that the data dri­ven tools have less restric­tion when applying. Learning tools with the sta­ble train­ing base usu­ally have reli­able per­for­mances. The paper con­tin­ues in this vein for ten pages, cul­mi­nat­ing in an equally remark­able con­clu­sion: With the sam­ple size grow­ing, the shadow set con­tains a large num­ber of func­tional, vir­tual data, instead of whole real data. It would pos­sess less pop­u­la­tion rep­re­sen­ta­tion then. Before estab­lish­ing the the­o­ret­i­cal basis, we used the trial-​​​​and-​​​​error way for the expe­di­ent expla­na­tion and con­cluded

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Should you make your working papers public?

Published on 9 June 2010

There seems to be two points of view on this with dif­fer­ent prac­tices in dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines. Some researchers do not make their work pub­lic until after it has been accepted for pub­li­ca­tion in a jour­nal. Until that time, drafts of papers are only cir­cu­lated to close con­fi­dants and usu­ally marked “Do not dis­trib­ute”. Work­ing papers are pub­lished on web sites and in web repos­i­to­ries (such as arXiv or RePEc) as soon as they are fin­ished, at about the same time they are sub­mit­ted to a jour­nal. Because I work with peo­ple in lots of dif­fer­ent fields, I come across both of these prac­tices. In the first sit­u­a­tion, I don’t post the work­ing paper on my web­site until all coau­thors agree, which is not until the paper is accepted at a jour­nal. In the sec­ond sit­u­a­tion, I post the work­ing paper on my web­site (and usu­ally also on RePEc) as soon as pos­si­ble. I don’t like the secrecy model at all, but it is hard to con­vince coau­thors who have been trained under that process to change. Different jus­ti­fi­ca­tions are given for keep­ing things secret, depend­ing on who I ask. Here are some of them (in bold) with my thoughts on why the stated rea­sons make lit­tle sense. It pre­vents rival

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