One pitfall in writing the related work section
In the related work section or elsewhere in a paper, many people tend to
compare the proposed approach with the existing approaches in a shallow way,
making the justification weak.
For example, your approach may be a
static analysis approach and when you compare with previous dynamic analysis
approaches, it is bad for you just say "Our approach based on static
analysis are different from the existing approaches because they are based
on dynamic analysis." It is not enough. You should describe what observable
inputs/outputs (benefits) that the internal technical differences in your
approach could bring. Here, it is better to say "Our approach based on
static analysis are different from the existing dynamic analysis approaches
because they require runtime setup and good sets of test suites, which are
not required by our approach." You can see that the difference is on the
observable inputs.
When you compare your dynamic analysis approach with
existing static analysis approaches. You can focus on the difference of the
observable outputs. You may say "... because our approach uses precise
runtime information, reducing false positives that are produced by existing
static
analysis approaches."
This issue has been raised in reviews
for one of our past submissions.
"you omit effectiveness rates of a lot
of tools in favor of "ours technically works differently on the inside".
That is not quite good enough;
the comparison should be on result, not just
on "we are technically different"."
You should go through your
related work section to see whether you described the differences in
observable results/benefits outside beyond just
describing technical
differences inside.
Posted at
02:32PM Jun 03, 2007
by XIE, TAO in Technical Writing |