Overview
This skill guides the creation of formal academic papers for computer science and engineering venues, with a focus on IEEE and ACM formatting standards. It covers manuscript structure, citation practices, figure/table conventions, and submission preparation. Applicable to conference papers (6-10 pages), journal articles (12-20 pages), and workshop papers (4-6 pages).
Paper Structure
IEEE Format (Two-Column)
Title
Authors (Name, Affiliation, Email)
Abstract (150-250 words)
Index Terms (4-6 keywords)
I. INTRODUCTION II. RELATED WORK III. METHODOLOGY / PROPOSED APPROACH IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION VI. CONCLUSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS REFERENCES
### ACM Format (Two-Column, CCS Concepts)
Title Authors (Name, Affiliation, Email, ORCID) Abstract (150-250 words) CCS Concepts (from ACM Computing Classification System) Keywords (3-6 terms)
1 INTRODUCTION 2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK 3 APPROACH / METHOD 4 EVALUATION 5 RESULTS 6 DISCUSSION 7 THREATS TO VALIDITY 8 CONCLUSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS REFERENCES
## Section Writing Guidelines
### Abstract
Write the abstract last. Follow the 4-sentence pattern:
1. **Context**: One sentence establishing the problem domain
2. **Problem**: One sentence stating the specific gap or challenge
3. **Approach**: One sentence describing your method/contribution
4. **Results**: One sentence summarizing key findings with numbers
Example (IEEE style, ~180 words): "Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, yet their performance degrades significantly on domain-specific APIs. This paper addresses the challenge of adapting LLMs to specialized codebases without extensive fine-tuning. We propose RetrievalCoder, a retrieval-augmented approach that indexes API documentation and retrieves relevant context at inference time using semantic similarity. Experiments on three enterprise codebases show that RetrievalCoder improves functional correctness by 34.2% over the base model and 12.8% over few-shot prompting, while reducing API hallucination rate from 47% to 8%."
### Introduction (1.5-2 pages)
Structure as an inverted triangle:
1. **Broad context** (1-2 paragraphs): Establish the research area
2. **Specific problem** (1 paragraph): Narrow to your exact problem
3. **Limitations of existing work** (1 paragraph): Why current solutions fall short
4. **Your contribution** (1 paragraph): What you do differently
5. **Contribution list** (bulleted): 3-4 concrete contributions
6. **Paper organization** (1 sentence): "The remainder of this paper is organized as..."
### Related Work (1-1.5 pages)
Organize by **theme**, not chronologically:
```markdown
## 2. Related Work
### 2.1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation
[Discuss RAG papers, position your work relative to them]
### 2.2 Code Generation with LLMs
[Discuss code LLM papers, explain what's different about your setting]
### 2.3 Domain-Specific Adaptation
[Discuss fine-tuning vs. prompting approaches]
Each paragraph should: (1) summarize the cited work, (2) state its limitation, (3) contrast with your approach.
Methodology (2-3 pages)
- Start with a system overview figure (architecture diagram)
- Use formal notation introduced in a "Preliminaries" subsection
- Define each component with its own subsection
- Include pseudocode (Algorithm environment) for complex procedures
- Explain design choices with justification
Experiments (2-3 pages)
Cover these elements systematically:
| Element | What to Include |
|---|---|
| Research Questions | RQ1, RQ2, RQ3 — one per aspect you evaluate |
| Datasets | Name, size, source, preprocessing, train/test split |
| Baselines | Each baseline with citation and brief description |
| Metrics | Definition of each metric, why it's appropriate |
| Implementation | Hardware, software versions, hyperparameters |
| Reproducibility | Code/data availability statement |
Results Tables
% IEEE style table
\begin{table}[t]
\caption{Comparison with baselines on CodeBench.}
\label{tab:main_results}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lcccc}
\toprule
Method & Pass@1 & Pass@5 & API Acc. & Latency \\
\midrule
GPT-4 (zero-shot) & 42.3 & 61.7 & 53.1 & 2.1s \\
GPT-4 (few-shot) & 55.8 & 72.4 & 71.2 & 2.3s \\
\textbf{Ours} & \textbf{68.0} & \textbf{81.2} & \textbf{91.8} & 2.8s \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table conventions:
- Caption above the table (IEEE/ACM standard)
- Bold the best result in each column
- Use
\toprule,\midrule,\bottomrule(booktabs) — no vertical lines - Include statistical significance indicators (†, *, **) with footnotes
Discussion
Address:
- Why does your method work? — Provide intuition and analysis
- When does it fail? — Failure case analysis builds credibility
- Ablation study — Remove components one at a time
- Threats to validity — Internal, external, construct validity
Citation Formatting
IEEE Style
% Numeric citations in square brackets
As shown by Smith et al. \cite{smith2024}, ...
Several studies \cite{smith2024, jones2023, lee2025} have shown ...
% BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{smith2024,
author = {Smith, John and Doe, Jane},
title = {Paper Title Here},
booktitle = {Proceedings of ICSE 2024},
year = {2024},
pages = {100--110},
doi = {10.1145/1234567.1234568}
}
ACM Style
% Author-year or numeric depending on template
\citet{smith2024} showed that ... % Smith et al. (2024)
\citep{smith2024} % (Smith et al., 2024)
Citation Best Practices
- Cite 40-60 references for a conference paper, 60-100 for a journal
- Include papers from the target venue (shows you know the community)
- Cite recent work (at least 30% from last 2 years)
- Always cite the original source, not a survey that mentions it
- Use DOI links in bibliography entries for verifiability
Submission Checklist
## Pre-Submission Checks
- [ ] Paper fits within page limit (including references for ACM, excluding for IEEE)
- [ ] Abstract under 250 words
- [ ] All figures are vector graphics (PDF) or high-resolution (≥300 DPI)
- [ ] Figure/table captions are self-contained (understandable without reading text)
- [ ] All references are complete (no "et al." in BibTeX, no missing venues/years)
- [ ] No orphan sections (every section has ≥2 paragraphs)
- [ ] Supplementary material / appendix prepared if needed
- [ ] Anonymous version: no author names, no "our previous work [1]" self-citations
- [ ] Spell check and grammar check completed
- [ ] PDF metadata does not reveal author identity (for double-blind review)