"How to write a great research paper" by Simon Peyton Jones #57

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1. lintool

   changed the title [-]How to write a great research paper[/-] [+]"How to write a great research paper" by Simon Peyton Jones[/+] on Sep 6, 2026
2. lintool

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   advice-by-others

   on Sep 6, 2026
3. lintool commented on Sep 6, 2026

   

   lintool

   on Sep 6, 2026

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   A summary of Simon Peyton Jones’s “How to write a great research paper”, plus reactions to the advice.

   TL;DR: Writing is part of doing research: it helps discover what the idea actually is, exposes gaps, and makes feedback possible. A good paper gives readers a clear idea they can understand and use.

   • Start writing early. Drafting should help drive the research, rather than wait until everything is finished.
   • Identify one central idea. Organize the paper around a clear problem, why it matters, your contribution, and supporting evidence.
   • Make contributions explicit. State concrete, testable claims in the introduction and show where the paper substantiates them.
   • Explain before comparing. Peyton Jones recommends putting extended related work after readers understand your idea, while giving others generous credit.
   • Lead with intuition and examples. Present the explanation readers need, rather than the chronology of your discovery.
   • Seek feedback widely. Expert and nonexpert readers reveal different problems; use their confusion to improve the paper.

   Reactions:

   • Practical endorsement: Tobias Grosser explicitly builds on Peyton Jones’s advice, recommending early title and abstract drafts to focus the research and get useful feedback throughout the project. Grosser’s writing guide
   • A qualification about related work: A Hacker News discussion questions whether moving related work later works everywhere. One commenter argues that crowded research areas may need earlier comparisons so readers can understand how the contribution differs from existing proposals; others describe different disciplinary conventions. This is a useful qualification to the presentation’s general advice. Discussion

   Web and X/Twitter searches did not yield an additional substantive X reaction I could verify; this is a limited public sample.

   The summary and reaction roundup above were generated by GPT-6 Astra in Codex.