Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
are so excited about the ideas that they fail to see the need for validation, and offer
results that have no plausible relevance to the paper's claims.
Another variety of inadequacy is when parts of the paper are missing, or dealt
with in a few brief lines rather than pages. Strikingly, some papers have no literature
review, or are based on a single out-of-date textbook, as if previous or recent work
was of no relevance. But if the author cannot be troubled to properly place the work
in context of what is already known, a reader cannot learn what the contribution is.
Another common failing is papers where the reader cannot identify what the data
is (there may be 200 documents, but where from? what content? what size? and so
on), or who ran the experiments, or what techniques were tried. In the mind of the
reader, moreover, there may not be much of a distinction between information that
is missing and information that is concealed—a line of thought that is unlikely to
lead to belief that the work was done well. And some papers just aren't ready to be
refereed; the underlying work is unfinished and the paper is incomplete.
Incomprehensibility
In the cases above, the shortcomings are not always immediately apparent. In other
cases, the paper's problems are obvious straight away. For example, when presented
with an incoherent abstract or introduction, the reader immediately feels that the
work cannot be of value. A reader can have no hope for a paper whose abstract begins
with the sentence: “Internet supports all type of the forms of information that are
digital, such as the pages of theWeb everywhere and also libraries and email, so it is a
language of all our information sources in a world repository that is our knowledge.”
8
In such cases, there seems to be a wide gap between what the writer wants to say
and the actual words on the page. I've observed similar writing in students who are
perfectly clear in conversation, but in documents seem to want to pour all of their
thoughts into a few sentences. But incomprehensibility stems frommany causes, and
takes many forms. Regardless of cause, if the result is a document that cannot be
read, it won't be.
Ugliness
The look of a document is another respect in which problems can be immediately
obvious. I suspect that many authors do not realise how much impact defects in
8
Or this opening sentence: “We have new networks of wireless like wired networks that our method
makes use of in computers connected to each other but heterogeneously and distributed.”
Or this one: “With the explosioning of documents on the internet, systems of finding documents
that are the answers of users their queries have become important in the recent years.”
Or this: “An ideal vector space is the base of IR research, so the basic problem of IR is to set up
a suitable vector space, in this suitable vector space, query and document can be represented well
by vectors.”
