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 the Git 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.

Table of Contents

Guidelines for the Paper and the Talk

Repositories

All files needed for creating a publication are stored in shared repositories (git). When you start writing a paper, start in a shared repository; don't start in your personal account to migrate to the repository "later".

The bib Repository

.PRECIOUS: asplos037-li.tex asplos037-li.tex: asplos06.tex

insertbbl asplos06.tex asplos037-li.tex

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

The latex Repository

Local Copies of the Repositories

~/texmf/tex/latex/shared

Eg, beamercustom.sty would then be found (after checking out/updating the local copy of the latex repository and running "texhash") under

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

Structure and Naming Conventions

Naming the paper repository and paper tex-file

Example: Two submissions to DATE'07 University booth are named "date07-spr" and "date07-xli".

(An alternative would be to name the file just something like "paper.tex", which would suffice in principle, as the directory name already uniquely identifies the paper. However, this has the disadvantages that

This would be problematic eg when mailing several papers together, or when making the papers available for download somewhere. Naming the papers according to their parent directory ensures that paper names are meaningful and unique.)

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

cp $< $@

The Talk

Note: <venue>-handout.pdf used to be called <venue>-talk-trans.pdf, to be consistent with the convention used for the lecture notes in course work. There, one also has a *-handout.pdf, but this is more than just a talk without animations - eg, it uses a different, printer friendly coloring scheme and suppresses empty note pages if possible. This is nice, but generally overkill for handouts created for electronic download to accompany papers. At some point (Feb 2009), the tea round decreed that we give up on this consistency, for sake of simplicity and brevity. The result is that there are two rules in the Makefile for generating a *-handout.pdf:

Rule 1) is the default to be used for papers and seminar presentations, Rule 2) is the rule used for lecture notes.

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.

One way to generate the full report, including the title page, is to separately create two pdfs (<venue>.pdf and <venue>-title.pdf), and then to collate them. One way to do this is described in  http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/reports/guidelines.html, using dvips, ps2pdf and texexec. The Makefile contains one target (%-all.pdf) to achieve the same, using pdfmerge. This works, but has disadvantages:

Hence, a suggested alternative to using this target is to

\usepackage{pdfpages} \begin{document} \includepdf[nup=1x1,pages=-]{<venue>-title.pdf} \setcounter{page}{1}

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

What Should Go into the Paper Directory

Optional Contents

Optional files:

Optional sub-directories:

What should NOT go into the paper directory

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:

This does not include pretty much everything else, in particular

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

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).

For the formatting of "Diplomarbeiten", see eg. Bell06, Fuhrmann05. In particular:

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:

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

<N1>[<N2>][+]<YY>[<CT>], with

<N1> := Last name of first author, capitalized, blanks eliminated

<N2> := First letter(s) of last names of 2nd - 4th author (if more than 1 author) Note: there should be one letter for each part of the last name eg. "Sangiovanni-Vincentelli" becomes "SV" (not just "S"), "von Hanxleden" becomes "vH" (not just "H")

+ indicates more than 4 authors

<YY> := last 2 (not 4!) digits of year of publication

<CT> := alphabetic counter to resolve identical keys (a, ... z, aa, ab, ...)

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:

This implies:

Comments

Comments should be added for the following

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.

A URL should be included like this:

note = {\url{ http://the.host.with.some/paper.pdf}}

Of course, the note may still contain additional information as well.

The one prerequisite for this to work is that the \url macro has to be defined before the \bibliography command appears in the .tex source. This is typically done by including the url package.

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

The Makefile

include ../../make/Tex.makefile

Making the Paper/Talk Available for Electronic Download

and reference <venue>.pdf in the "pdf" field of the bib-entry.

(note the different target directories) and reference <venue>-talk.pdf in the "urltalk" field of the bib-entry. If you prefer to post the slides without animation, you may replace <venue>-talk.pdf with <venue>-handout.pdf.

	ssh biblio@rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de "(cd ~/git/bib; git pull)"
	ssh biblio@rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de "(cd ~/bib; make cleanhtml)"
	ssh biblio@rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de "(cd ~/bib; make)"