How to Prepare a Paper

This page contains some general guidelines on how to proceed when preparing a scientific paper (for a workshop, conference, journal, etc). The focus here is on the proper use of theGit repositories, in particular the Papers project. This project contains publications and presentations, and is subsequently referred to as "rt papers repository" or just "papers repository". See Git/Structure on how this fits into the rest of the Gitorious project and repository structure.

Guidelines for the Paper and the Talk

• Two guiding principles should be
  • abstraction
  • consistency

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• The standard format for talks is the beamer style used also in the lectures. If for some reason you still prefer to use another format for the talk, then at least the tex-source (<venue>-talk.tex - see below) should be written in a way compatible with the beamer style. Eg, you should not use absolute lengths that are not compatible with the paper size used by beamer. (In general it is not a good style to use absolute lengths to specify the size and placement of objects, you should instead use relative sizes, eg ".2\textwidth".)

The bib Repository

• The bib repository is part of the Resources project, and is referred to as "rt bib repository" or just "bib repository".

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Note: to use this, you must have the bib repository on your PATH.

The latex Repository

• The latex repository is also part of the Resources project and contains some latex style files shared by the group, eg "cau-rt.sty" (mainly for papers), "beamercustom.sty" (mainly for presentations), "lstcustom.sty" (included by the former files) and related files, and is referred to as "rt latex repository" or just "latex repository".

Local Copies of the Repositories

• Everybody's local copies of the papers and bib repostories should reside in the same directory; ie, from within the papers repository, the bib repository can be reached with "../bib", and vice versa. One should be able to rely on this, eg when including the Makefile in the bib-repository (see above/below).

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~/texmf/tex/latex/shared/latex/beamer/beamercustom.sty

Structure and Naming Conventions

• Each directory within the paper repository contains one paper (conference, journal, technical report, or just a presentation - eg for SYNCHRON). Henceforth each directory within the paper repository is referred to as "paper directory". There are several paper directories, but just one paper repository.

Naming the paper repository and paper tex-file

• Each paper has its own Git repository in the Papers project, whose name should indicate the venue where it is published, and also the year of publication. Henceforthe this name is referred to as <venue>.

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.PRECIOUS: 118.pdf 118.pdf: sac06.pdf

cp $< $@

The Talk

• For conference papers, the slides for the talk should reside in directly in the paper repository (not in a subdirectory).

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Another note: naming conventions for the seminar and Oberseminar are similar, see here .

Technical Reports

The institute's Technical Reports ("Technische Berichte") include a standardized title page; see ifireport/ifireport.sty in the latex repository. Unfortunately, there is no macro (yet?) to include directly in <venue>.tex to generate the title page; this title page must be generated separately. The source for the title page should be named <venue>-title.tex.

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<venue>.pdf: <venue>-title.pdf

What Should Go into the Paper Directory

• <venue>[-talk].tex

<venue>[-talkhandout].pdf

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• The Makefile - see below.

Optional Contents

Optional files:

• Makefile.local (see below)

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• "travel-info", containing maps, public transit schedules, etc. (excluding personal booking information).

What should NOT go into the paper directory

• Intermediate files - .aux, .bbl, .toc, etc.

• Style files etc. that are part of the tex-installation - ie, part of TeX-Live

The Bibliography - Guidelines for bibtex Entries

Bib files

In general, one should try to not use a "personal" bib file for a paper or a thesis, but use one of the shared bib files that are in the Git bib repository. (See Git/Structure ) The rationale is that this makes it easier to share entries and to keep them consistent.

The bib repository includes the following files:

pub-rts.bib: publications of the rt group

This file should contain proper publications, as they should appear for example in the Almanach or in the "publications" web page. This includes:

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If you want to reference such documents that are excluded here, you can include them in cau-rt.bib or rts-arbeiten.bib (for student works)

pub-<user>.bib: publications by <user>

This contains publications that are not included in pub-rts.bib. This includes

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The publication web page of <user> is extracted from the union of pub-rts.bib and pub-<user>.bib.

rts-arbeiten.bib: student theses

This contains student theses (Bachelor/Master/Studien/Diplomarbeiten).

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• The entry type is MastersThesis
• school = {Christian-Albrechts-Universit{\"a}t zu Kiel, Department of Computer Science}
• type = {Diploma thesis}
• If the work is not submitted yet, add a note "To appear"; otherwise, add the month accordingly to the date of submission.
• There is no note "unpublished".

cau-rt.bib: publications outside of the rt group

This file contains references used by the group, excluding publications and student works produced by the group itself - these should go to pub-*.bib or rts-arbeiten.bib. In case you have an electronic version of a referenced paper, and that paper was not trivially available on the web, you should consider to not just add a bib entry, but also to store the paper in the group's Digital Library .

Language and text coding

The language is english, as this is the language of most papers using these entries. That means:

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To write german umlauts and other special characters use the standard tex coding i.e. {\"a}, {\"o}, {\"u}, {\ss}

Keys

The key should be generated according to the following format

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If there are no conflicts (<CT>-field empty), this scheme should allow correct citing without having to look up the key in the bib-file.

Order of entries

The entries should appear in the bib file in the following order:

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• Alphabetical by (all) authors
• For the same author combination, year of publication except that 99 comes before 00 (If this is checked automatically, the checker may assume that the citations here do not span more than 100 years :-)
• If the above are identical, the <CT>-part of key. Eg: Edwards99, Edwards02, Edwards02a, Edwards02b, Edwards03, EdwardsHvHS05, EdwardsKH04

Comments

Comments should be added for the following

• AAA ... ZZZ denote the letters of last names of first authors
• Last names of first authors (once)
• login of bib-creator + date (format YYYY-MM-DD) + "DL", if cached in Digital Library ?
• URL, for downloadable papers
• OPTIONAL: additional info, e.g. usage in a seminar

URLs

It can be helpful to include a URL for publications that are available for public download and did not appear in archival journals or established conference/workshop venues. There are bibtex styles that make use of a field "url" for just this purpose. However, most of the standard bib styles just ignore this field. Therefore, to have bib entries as portable as possible, we advocate to use the "note" field (which is generally not ignored) to include the URL.

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Note that this convention gives you full flexibility on how URLs should appear in the bibliography. This includes the option to not list any urls, by redefining the \url macro accordingly.

Further guidelines for adding entries

• In general, entries should be as complete as possible
• If known, first names of authors should be included
• Titles should be capitalized iff they are capitalized in the publication itself
• For portability, month entries should use abbreviations; use the `#'-operator to concatenate. For example: month = sep # "/" # oct, or: month = "1.~" # apr

The Makefile

• To compile a paper or presentation, a Makefile should be used. However, to avoid re-inventing the wheel and for a common user interface, a common Makefile should be used, which resides in the make repository. To implement this, each paper directory should contain a Makefile that just contains an include command, with a relative reference to the Makefile in the make repository. Ie, the Makefile in a paper directory should just contain the line

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• Deviations from this Makefile or customizations (eg, specifying a default target) should be contained in "Makefile.local", which, if it exists, is included by the Makefile in the bib repository. Note: as Makefile.local is still part of the repository, the customizations in Makefile.local are still shared by all users. If you really, really need customizations just for yourself, you should find some other way to incorporate them - eg by adding new targets or variables to the Makefile.

Making the Paper/Talk Available for Electronic Download

• Congratulations - your paper has been accepted! Now you should share the joy by making it available via the group's publication page. This is done by posting the .pdfs for the paper and also for the talk, if there is any, and by adding an entry for the paper to pub-rts.bib that links to the .pdfs.

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