Comments from a machine learning / AI focused PhD student. Sorry if I get a bit ridiculous below, I'm up to my neck in coffee and having one of my more "esoteric" days...
0) Golden rules:
- Readability & formatting matters.
- Know your audience.
- Context matters.
- Brevity is best.
- Be clear & concise.
- Abstract, General Intro, Aims, Background/Previous work, Method, Results, Conclusions, Future work => In that order.
- Most important: Nothing goes into the main body unless it makes a tangible, useful & clear contribution.
Some of the best papers are the shortest ones: I can read, understand and explain it to someone else in 1 hour. Among the worst are the 25 pagers that take me 2 days to realise that they aren't useful to me.
1) Footnotes
You aren't commenting code. If it doesn't go in the main text, why is it even there? It is distracting away from the important part - the main body of text.
It either lives in the main text body, a reference or the appendix. If it doesn't live there, then maybe footnote (e.g. a url to some very specific data you trained against).
Get very delete happy with them. For example:
- viii & xiii @ on page 3, xvi @ page 4 should either be in main body (if important, they don't look it), or deleted.
- Things like python commands should just get dumped in the appendix. No footnote / reference. A blanket "you can see all the commands used along with descriptions in the appendix". I'm going to look at what is in the appendix anyway. Because I'm a pedantic academic.
2) Formatting:
- Think about using a template like [1].
- Reduce your font size to 10pt please.
- If you are going to be very maths heavy, think about moving to a single column style. I, personally, find it makes it easier to read eqns and to follow their logic. Currently I have to jump from around the page and keep getting lost.
- For sections 5 & 6: Stop putting something in bold every paragraph. Bold is only to highlight when it's really important. The name of something is not really important. Prefer italics over bold, but even use that sparingly. How difficult was it to focus on reading this paragraph when the words keep changing shape?
3) Graphs & Tables
Graphs & Tables exist at the top of a page. That's the only place they live if they live in the main body. They don't have to be on the same page as where you refer to them, and you can group them together. Otherwise, appendix that stuff.
Else you'll to end up with blank space (like end of page 4 & 5) and formatting headaches later on.
You haven't done your results discussion part yet... When you do, make sure you don't talk about every single table/graph. Only talk about the results that are important. Otherwise it's guff that will bore your audience.
4) Structure:
You have so many sections that I need a table of contents to work out where I am. For a 10-15 pager, that's silly. Learn to love subsections. Especially those early parts.
5) Intro & Background work:
I have no idea what previous work this relates to. Is there previous work in the field? If so, talk about it. Talk about how you're improving it. Talk about what the context of this paper is.
Don't know what the context is? Then you better find out... People will ask!
6) Quotations
This seems like a technical paper, not an English lit assignment. If you directly quote anything, let alone a whole paragraph, it better blow my mind. I am afraid page 3, column 2 does not. Remove it. Just reference anything like that. If people want/need to know, they will read it too.
[1] https://www.ctan.org/pkg/ieeetran