Once, a symposium was held in the editorial department of a periodical. The theme is how to improve the level of magazines. It is generally acknowledged that the premise of improving the level is the high quality of the manuscript. Everyone feels the same way about the decline in the quality of manuscripts in recent years. As for the reason, different people have different opinions. Some comrades think that it is the rejuvenation of the author team; Some comrades believe that in some evaluation systems for individuals or units, the number of papers is set as an index, which leads to the simple pursuit of quantity and shoddy construction. Admittedly, these can be the reasons, but some of them are independent of our own will. We should see that it is an inevitable trend and a good thing for the young writers, especially the young writers are in a period of vigorous creativity, which is an important guarantee for good articles. On the surface, the quality of papers has declined seriously, but the main reason is that the basic training of paper writing is not enough. This situation can be changed through hard work. So I summarize the problems encountered in peer review, hoping to help some authors write.
First, the content of scientific papers.
I learned it in middle school. The main genres of this article are narrative and argumentative. Narrative is about the background, process and influence of an event, and some author's feelings can also be added. Argumentative writing is about the argumentation of some problems and the verification of proving the correctness of argumentation, that is, providing arguments, reasoning and finally drawing conclusions. Therefore, these two schools are very different. There is also a genre that is close to argumentative writing, but not in the strict sense. It only expresses its own views or impressions on certain issues or phenomena. Although it has opinions, it does not deliberately prove its correctness. This kind of article belongs to essays, and this article belongs to this kind of article.
Scientific papers should be argumentative, or at least have opinions. Generally speaking, the main problems to be solved in scientific papers are not "what" but "how to do it" and "why". It is better to have "why" in the article "How to do it".
Some authors can easily write argumentative essays into narratives, especially concluding articles after doing research on a project. They only say how to do it, and seldom say why. The reason may be that the writing is fluent, because the work is done by them, the process is clear, and it can be explained easily. Such an article is not deep enough. In recent years, software has been concerned by everyone, but most software articles belong to this situation.
A scientific paper is neither a work summary nor a manual.
Of course, the correctness of the content of the paper is very important. However, the errors in different fields are very different and it is difficult to summarize. However, five points should be noted:
(1) Be innovative, or at least be innovative. Whether there is innovation is the most important starting point for many publications to consider employment, especially authoritative publications like China Science. Without innovation, employment is impossible. It can be said that there are two kinds of innovation: original innovation and integrated innovation. In engineering papers, there are few original innovations, and most of them put forward some new methods and algorithms, or analyze a problem in a way that others have never used before. This is a comprehensive innovation. Although this is also desirable, the paper must eloquently explain the results obtained by adopting the new method. There is a paper about the road extraction method of color image based on Hermit spline. There is nothing wrong with the method itself, but there are two conclusions. First, it is said that discontinuous road signs extracted by Hermit spline fitting can get continuous road signs. In fact, ordinary cubic spline or polynomial fitting can also solve this problem. Secondly, Hermit spline is more suitable to express curved road markings on images, but there is no data to explain why other fitting curves are not suitable. Therefore, although others have never used Hermit spline in road extraction, the new idea of this paper no longer exists.
(2) The writing of the paper must highlight the key points. There is an article about the dexterous hand of robot, and the project itself is well done, but this article covers the structure, finger drive and grasping control of dexterous hand, and all parts are not thorough and have no depth. It would be much better if this article could focus on the driving of dexterous hands with limited size. There is also an article about tele-technology. First, it talks about the structure of miniature cameras in general. Then, the basic concepts of fuzzy control that people know are all extracted from some books, and there is no organic connection between them. Such an article has no content at all. If we focus on the problem solved by miniaturization of visual system, I am afraid we can write something.
(3) The content of the paper should be true and correct. This is very important, and not cheating is a good scientific ethics. If people see the fake, this article will definitely not be used. There is an article about control algorithm, which is a simulation algorithm. The joint angle function used in the simulation is q=0. 1sin(3πt), and the period is obviously (2/3)s, but.
(4) About summarizing the article. The content of the summary article is mainly about what the predecessors have done on a specific topic, what problems have been solved, and what problems need further study. The most important thing is to point out the direction of further research on this subject. In this sense, writing a summary article is actually very difficult and requires a lot of information. Moreover, it is necessary to analyze information, discard the rough and retain the essence, discard the false and retain the true, and build a strategic position.
5. As for the formulas in the papers, there are always formulas in scientific papers. The correctness of formula derivation is of course very important, but it is not necessary to describe the step-by-step derivation process clearly. Although some articles have written formulas, it is useless to pay attention to the interpretation of symbols used in the formulas and the applicable conditions of the formulas. An article discusses a parallel mechanism with three artificial muscles as the actuator, and the author tries to establish its mathematical model. The relationship between input air pressure and muscle length of artificial muscle is written, and the force balance equation is listed. Then a nonlinear equation of state is obtained by combining the former with the latter as a mathematical model. There are many coefficients in the equation, which are obviously related to the mechanism and muscle parameters. The author just didn't write the relationship between coefficients and parameters, which makes people wonder whether this model is derived. Even so, such a model is just a general formula and useless.
Second, the title of the paper
The title of the paper has the function of making the finishing point. The title should be very relevant to the content of the article, which is often overlooked. Some titles are too big; Some of them are too limited. There is an article entitled "Kinematics Research of Humanoid Arm of Service Robot", which is the author's kinematics analysis of a seven-degree-of-freedom arm when developing service robot. "Humanoid" is not important, but the author puts forward a method to solve the inverse kinematics of redundant arm, which can not only be used for service robots. If the topic is changed to "a solution to the inverse kinematics of a humanoid arm with seven degrees of freedom", it is of both academic significance and the author's research project. There is also a paper entitled "Research on Joint Lubrication Technology of Lunar Landing Robot", which is about the preparation and characteristics of a solid lubrication film. The topic of the paper is too big. If the robot landing on the moon is explicitly mentioned in the topic, experiments should be carried out in the environment of simulating the ultra-low vacuum, ultra-low temperature and strong dust on the moon. Conditions are not yet available. If the topic is changed to "Study on the Preparation Method and Characteristics of Molybdenum Sulfide-based Solid Lubricating Film", the scope will be narrowed and the experiment that cannot be carried out at present will be avoided. There are some problems with the topic itself. For example, there is a doctoral thesis entitled "Dynamic Walking Control of Humanoid Robot". Is walking static? Certainly not. Even static is dynamic. Isn't such a title a joke?
Third, abstraction.
Abstract is a summary of the article. To be concise, you only need to explain the purpose of writing the paper, the methods used and the results obtained. There are often some useless words in poorly written abstracts, such as "with the development of robot technology, the application field is broader, and a certain problem has become a hot topic of research", and so on.
IV. Introduction
The purpose of the introduction is to put forward the problems to be solved in this paper at the beginning. The introduction should be simple and clear. Some people write articles about robots. At first, they wrote a play written by a Czech writer, in which a robot slave was named Robota, and the first industrial robot was made in the United States in 1950, which went around too many circles and was a bit like "Greece".
It is necessary for many papers to briefly describe the previous work in this field in the introduction, especially those articles that propose improvements to the previous methods. It should be noted that the summary of predecessors' work should not be taken out of context, deliberately distorting the meaning of others and highlighting the advantages of their own methods, which is even more undesirable. In a paper, the summary of predecessors' work should be put in the introduction as far as possible. In the text, there should be no such generalization unless necessary.
The citation of the literature should be correct. Your article quotes some literature, and others' articles may also quote your article. If you don't pay attention to the correctness when quoting, it may spread. An article about teleoperation quoted an article in the American journal Nature, and mentioned teleoperation in two places 7000km apart. It only takes 1.50μs from the time the operator sends the operation command to the time the information is fed back to the executive. This is completely impossible. Even if the radio wave travels in a straight line, it will take at least 46.67ms before it is discovered that the unit cited by the author is wrong. If the article is published, with the authority of Nature magazine and the influence of the author of this article, this erroneous data will definitely be cited again.
Some papers have also started to quote literature and news on the Internet, which is more reliable. For various reasons, the reliability of this message is not high. We developed a remote-controlled target vehicle for a test base with armored vehicles, which was reported in Weapons Knowledge. Because some contents are inconvenient to make public, some technical treatment has been done to the article. This news became "China successfully developed remote-controlled armored vehicle" and "ant" became "elephant" on the Internet. Therefore, if we want to quote news on the Internet, we must use other channels.
Many papers will also explain the structure of the article in the introduction, although it is not necessary. For a paper, it is necessary to explain the structure of the whole paper in the introduction because of its large space. Articles published in journals are not necessary.
Experimental verification of verb (abbreviation of verb)
The purpose of this experiment is to verify the correctness, feasibility and effectiveness of the theory or method proposed in this paper. At one stage, I didn't agree to call simulation experiment, but with the progress of simulation technology, it can at least become a means of verification.
The correctness of the theory does not always need experiments to verify. New theorems proved by accepted theorems do not need to be verified.
The verification of the feasibility of the method is relatively simple, and the experiment only needs to show that the method used solves the problem.
Many papers fail to verify methods (especially algorithms). The so-called effective, should be to solve the problem faster or simpler than other methods, or low computational complexity, or higher computational speed, or occupy less memory. To illustrate the effect, it is necessary to compare, not "Pharaoh sells melons"; The second is to have corresponding data.
In this sense, the experiment in this paper is often designed to explain the problem. The design of the experiment is very important. To explain the function of a certain factor, we must try to isolate it.
I have reviewed four papers on the construction of robot simulation team in succession. These four papers are well written except for the narrative content. The content of the article involves personal skills, decision-making mechanism and overall coordination, so I won't go into details. In addition, the team participated in the robot soccer World Cup simulation group twice and achieved good results. In other words, the technical measures taken in the team building era are still effective. However, these four articles all use the score of the competition to illustrate the effectiveness of technical measures, which is inappropriate. Because the score of the football match is only a ranking, it can only explain the relative strength of each team. If the opponent's strength is too low, even if he wins the championship, it can't effectively explain that the measures he has taken are correct. Moreover, as mentioned above, whether a team can win is related to personal skills, decision-making ability, overall coordination and other factors. It is often unclear which factors play a role in achieving better results. In the last two articles, the author used the same competition results to illustrate the role of different technical measures, which is obviously unconvincing. If the same opponent plays twice with or without the measures in the text, the result of the game can better illustrate the role of this measure.
For various reasons, many papers can't prove the correctness and effectiveness of this method with strict theory, and can't do experiments for the time being, so they use simulation to explain it. At this time, it should be noted that although only a few simulation examples can be given in the article, when doing simulation, we should make as many examples as possible for all possible situations, because the simulation results of two examples show that the conclusion is likely to be overturned by another example. There is a paper trying to find the shortest traversal path among several points with known mutual distance. The length of the paper is very long and the method used is correct, but it is not proved. Finally, an example is used for simulation. I wrote a simpler method when reviewing the manuscript, which is consistent with the result obtained by the thesis method. In this way, the method proposed in this paper is good.
Conclusion of intransitive verbs
Conclusion There are not many questions, but there are not many wonderful conclusions. Because of the convenience of "copying" and "pasting" provided by Word and other word processing software, some words in the text, introduction and abstract of the paper are copied into the conclusion, and you know what the conclusion says before you see it. This conclusion is tasteless. However, we occasionally encounter "going too far", and the problems not covered in this paper suddenly emerge in the conclusion.
Seven. writing
I used to write with a pen, and I often heard people say that "a word is a person's face", which means that a good hand will add luster to you and make you look comfortable. Now the words on the paper are printed by the printer, so whether the article is fluent or not is very prominent, which becomes a "human face." As the saying goes, "a word is like a person." If there are too many problems in the text of an article, read it.
In the manuscript, the outstanding problems in terms of words and punctuation are:
One sentence a day, one sentence a day, where to think, where to say, the tone and meaning are incoherent.
⑵ The meaning of words is repetitive, words are wordy and pronouns are used improperly.
⑶ Fictional words such as "Er", "So", "Ran" and "Qi" are used awkwardly.
(4) Improper use of terms or improper coinage of terms is the last word of this paper. If there are national standards for terms in a certain field, although such standards are generally recommended standards, the terms recognized by the standards should be used first in order to be consistent with other people's languages. Ordinary names should not be used in papers, even though such nouns have been used by more people. Terms have connotations. When formulating terminology standards, each term has a strict definition. If a new term must be created in the paper, its connotation must be clearly defined and defined. I once questioned "trajectory tracking control" in a paper. On the surface, "tracking control" is acceptable. Come to think of it, there are only two words that can be associated with "control". One is the object, such as "temperature control". The other is methods, such as PID control, adaptive control and fuzzy control. What is "trajectory tracking control"? Trajectory tracking is neither a control object nor a control method. The actual trajectory tracking of the expected trajectory is the effect of controlling the trajectory. Therefore, "trajectory tracking" and "trajectory control" are both available terms, while "trajectory tracking control" is.
5] Indiscriminate use of punctuation. The most common mistakes are periods, long sentences, or inappropriate sentence breaks. The most difficult mistakes are only question marks and exclamation marks.
In recent years, there is a very fashionable and overused word "based on". Sometimes when you open a magazine, the title of the article is "based on". The English for "based on X" is "X-based" or "Based on X". It should be said that the translation of the word "based on" is still good. The "rule-based system" is better than that in earlier years. "Rule-based system" sounds more pleasant. The problem is to use "based on" in a necessary and appropriate way. There is no need to use it, and there is no need to pursue the taste of wrinkles. Moreover, since it is "based on X", then X should be a real thing that can be used as a basis. An article uses "based on task level ...", this "
In fact, it is not difficult to solve the problems in writing. Most problems in writing can be found as long as the author reads the article once or twice after writing it. However, if the author is not standardized and rigid in oral expression, he will not achieve much.
Eight, the English version of the special problems
English is not our mother tongue, so there are some problems in writing papers in English. Most people don't have the ability to think in English. In this case, it is better to write a Chinese manuscript first and then translate it into English, so as to at least avoid the problem of semantic incoherence that is easy to occur when writing an English manuscript directly.
The most common word problems in English manuscripts are:
(1) forms the so-called Chinglish according to the hard translation of Chinese. Although "Pidgin" such as "study hard and make progress every day" is rare, hard translation is still common. One paper translated "vehicle-mounted" into "tank-mounted". In fact, the word "vehicle" means vehicle.
(2) Improper use of prepositions, more use of "of" and "to", less use of other prepositions.
(3) Pronouns "this" and "that" are often used, while "it" is rarely used, and the latter is only used in scientific articles.
The sentence pattern is monotonous, and I like (or have to use "to be" to make sentences.
5. Don't pay attention to the part of speech of verbs. Some verbs can be both transitive verbs and intransitive verbs, so we should give priority to using transitive verbs to make sentences instead of using the passive voice of transitive verbs.
[6] the articles "a" and "the" are used improperly, especially the definite article "the" is easily forgotten.
(7) Pay no attention to the singular and plural nouns and the person collocation of subject and predicate.
(8) The words used in the paper should be more formal, and polysemous words should be used as little as possible. For example, "get" means "get" in spoken language, but it is better to use "objective" in the paper.
(9) The differences between Chinese and Western cultures often make English manuscripts have "China characteristics". The author of a manuscript is very modest. At the end of the article, he analyzed the shortcomings of the proposed method, and said that these shortcomings will be gradually overcome in future research. Foreigners don't say that. Even if they see the shortcomings, they will say that with the deepening of research, this method will have a broader application prospect. In the introduction of some articles, the author must be a "professor".
Nine. Signature of the document
There is no doubt that the first author of the paper should be the author, which is both a respect for his work and a responsibility for the article.
Many articles are written by graduate students, followed by the name of the tutor, which is beyond reproach. But from some articles, it is obvious that the tutor has not read it before submitting it. Even some articles have been published, and the tutor doesn't know. This is not good. Even if the tutor participated in the opinion before writing, he did not read it after writing, which is that the tutor did not take responsibility. If students contribute in the name of the tutor without the tutor's knowledge, it is respect for the tutor on the good side, and it is suspected of "raising the flag as a tiger skin" on the bad side.
Recently, there is a trend that more and more people sign papers, and even a short essay is signed by five or six people. This situation is more common in the summary article of a project. Admittedly, it is difficult to distinguish the ideas of project participants in the research process, but the paper is not a work summary, and writing a paper is unlikely to concentrate many people's ideas. As for writing more people's gifts or writing the names of leaders who have never participated in the work, it is even more undesirable.
X. How to face peer review opinions
Generally speaking, the delivered manuscript must undergo at least one technical review, and the English manuscript must also undergo a text review. This review is usually conducted by experts in the same field hired by the editorial department of a periodical or magazine. The responsibility of the editorial department is to unify the paper format, review the text and handle the opinions of peer review. The responsibility of the reviewer is to review the innovation and correctness of the paper, and the review opinions should generally include suggestions for revision to improve the quality of the manuscript.
The author should first attach great importance to the reviewer's comments and consider why he made these suggestions. After all, the reviewer's opinion comes from an outsider. As the saying goes, "bystanders see clearly", there is always some truth in his views. Some authors think that reviewers don't understand their own articles (I don't rule out this possibility), so it is wrong to seriously consider his opinions. The reviewer is the first reader of the paper. If he doesn't understand them, it's wrong.
Of course, we should also analyze the opinions of reviewers. Although the reviewers hired by the editorial department are all experts in the same field, they are interlaced like mountains and have a wide range of fields. Reviewers may not be familiar with a specific topic studied by the author of the article, so it is not surprising that some opinions are not very pertinent. So there is no need to follow the reviewers' opinions completely.
If you want to revise after reviewing the manuscript, you must be realistic and can't cope with the reviewers. I commented on a paper about the drag reduction effect of bristle surface for a magazine. At the first trial, I raised some questions and asked for a retrial after revision. The author is very modest, admits that all the questions raised are reasonable, and makes some modifications. But the most critical question I raised was about the experiment, and the author was a little perfunctory. The experimental results are displayed in another curve form different from the first draft, which obviously cannot be obtained from the previous experimental results. I have great doubts, so I suggest to try again after revision. In the third draft, the author changed the way and there were more loopholes. Later, this manuscript never appeared again.
Many editorial departments adopt a double-blind system for peer review, that is, the reviewer does not know who the author of the paper is; The author doesn't know who the reviewer is. No matter what the starting point of this system is, I think it limits the communication between authors and reviewers to words, and some editorial departments even relay only some opinions of reviewers to the authors. Such communication is often inadequate, which is likely to become an obstacle to improving the quality of manuscripts. Since we are studying, we should not have scruples.
The editorial departments of some magazines don't seem to review manuscripts. As soon as you publish the manuscript, write that you want to publish it in a certain issue and pay a page fee. This is an irresponsible editorial department and should be kept away from it.
Speaking of titles, the title of this article is too big. However, this article is only an essay. This title is used to pursue an eye-catching effect. It doesn't mean that you can write a good paper by paying attention to what is mentioned in this article. To give an inaccurate example, a paper is like a tree, and its content is its trunk and branches. Title, introduction, experiment, text, etc. What is mentioned in this article may be a part of a leaf. This tree is rooted in truth.
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