Page 275 - English for Writing Research Papers

261

14.10 What are typical pitfalls of an Introduction?
The Introduction is often the least interesting for you to write, as you may feel it is
only incidental to your research.

In an attempt to save time, researchers often skip over whole periods and papers that
led to their research and may simply cite a series of references with a throwaway
comment such as: these were great efforts preceding our work .

However, it is at some point necessary to present the novelty of your approach and
results in the context of what has already been done. Citing key papers, but without

stating how specifically you build on them, is insuffi cient.
It is not necessary to “do better” or “more” than them, but (i) describe, with at least
one sentence, what others have done, as far as relevant for the direction of your
paper, and (ii) describe how your contribution is original and distinguishes itself
from previous work. You can do this by:

• listing the shortcomings of previous approaches with a clear analysis of how
your proposed approach is an improvement. Match each shortcoming with the
advantage that your approach offers
• introduce a new approach, algorithm, procedure, set-up, experiment etc and

validate it
If a reviewer calls for you to add more details to your Introduction, by writing a
sentence such as “The authors ignore over 30 years of xxx community efforts in
relation to yyy”, then you cannot simply put additional references.

By covering previous work, you will be able to highlight what the great potential
improvements are that your approach could bring. If you do that, your own approach
will then be sufficiently introduced and justified. Some of the manuscripts you

review will help yours because they raise questions that you can address. Of course,
other researchers have probably pursued similar avenues, and those papers also
need to be cited in this regard.
A key issue is to make it clear whose work you are talking about: yours or another
author's. To learn how to do this see Chapter 7 .

Note: Much of the above subsection was based on the comments made by an anony-
mous referee to a paper I edited.