Paper Planning

A structured approach to planning academic papers before writing begins. Covers four key activities: Story design, Experiment planning, Figure design, and Timeline management.

When to Use This Skill

If you don't yet have an idea, use the research-ideation skill first to find a problem and design a solution.

• User wants to plan a paper before writing
• User asks about structuring a paper's story or contributions
• User needs to plan experiments (comparisons, ablations)
• User wants to design pipeline figures or teaser figures
• User asks about writing timelines or submission schedules

Planning Overview

Paper planning follows four steps, ideally completed before writing begins:

Step 1: Story Design     → What is the narrative? What are the contributions?
Step 2: Experiment Plan   → What experiments prove our claims?
Step 3: Figure Design     → How do we visually communicate the method?
Step 4: Timeline          → When does each section get written?

Counterintuitive Planning First

Prioritize these counterintuitive rules before regular planning:

1. Write your rejection letter first: Draft the top-5 likely rejection comments ("limited novelty", "missing baseline", "not robust", etc.), then plan experiments that directly preempt each one.
2. Narrow claim before broad claim: Define the smallest defensible core claim first. Expand only after evidence is strong. Over-broad claims fail review more often than narrow strong claims.
3. Design ablations before polishing method text: If a module cannot be ablated cleanly, its contribution claim is weak.
4. Allocate compute to stress tests, not only benchmarks: A single convincing stress-test figure often contributes more than multiple small benchmark gains.
5. Plan a fallback narrative now: If SOTA gain is marginal, predefine a secondary value proposition (efficiency, robustness, fewer assumptions, wider applicability).

See references/counterintuitive-planning.md

Step 1: Story Design

The "story" is the logical narrative that connects the problem, insight, method, and results.

Reverse Engineering the Story

Work backwards to build the story:

1. What is the technical problem? — The specific challenge that existing methods cannot solve well
2. What are our contributions? — The concrete technical novelties
3. What are the benefits and new insights? — What advantages does our approach provide?
4. How do we lead into the challenge? — How to frame the task and previous methods to naturally arrive at the challenge

Then write forward: Task → Previous methods → Challenge → Our contributions → Advantages

Core Elements to Define

Before writing any section, clearly articulate:

Starting Point: Pipeline Figure Sketch

Start by drawing a pipeline figure sketch. This forces you to clarify the overall method before writing.

The pipeline figure sketch serves as the paper's visual backbone:

• Draw it before writing anything
• It reveals whether the method is clear enough to explain
• It identifies the novel modules vs. standard components
• It determines subsection structure for the Method section

See references/story-design.md

Step 2: Experiment Planning

Plan experiments before writing to avoid discovering gaps late.

Two Categories of Experiments

Comparison Experiments — Prove our method is better:

• Which baseline methods to compare against?
• Which datasets and metrics?
• What is the evaluation protocol?

Ablation Studies — Prove each module is effective:

• Part 1: One big table showing impact of core contributions
• Part 2: Several small tables for design choices and hyperparameters

Planning Checklist

• List all comparison baselines (recent, relevant, SOTA)
• Define evaluation metrics (standard for the task)
• Identify datasets (standard benchmarks + challenging demos)
• List ablation configurations (remove each core component)
• Plan design-choice tables (hyperparameters, input quality, alternatives)
• Plan demo scenarios (challenging data to showcase upper limit)

See references/experiment-planning.md

Experiment Plan Template

Use the template at assets/experiment-plan-template.md to organize your experiment plan.

Step 3: Figure Design

The pipeline figure is for highlighting novelty, not for making readers understand. The Method text is what makes readers understand.

Pipeline Figure Principles

• Highlight novelty: The pipeline figure showcases what is new, not just the workflow
• Differentiate from prior work: The figure must look different from previous methods
• Novel modules stand out: If the overall pipeline is standard, zoom in on novel modules
• Focus on clarity of the novel parts; standard components can be simplified

Teaser Figure

The teaser (usually Figure 1) shows the key result at a glance:

• Place it at the top of the first page
• Should be immediately compelling
• Reference it from the Introduction

Visual Quality Matters

Visual polish directly influences review outcomes. See references/figure-design.md for the full visual quality guide (pipeline figures, tables, typography)

Step 4: Timeline

4-Week Countdown

Start writing at least 1 month before the deadline.

Critical: By the end of Week 3, you must send the Introduction and Method drafts to your advisor — otherwise the advisor likely will not have enough time to finish reviewing the paper.

See references/timeline-4week.md for the detailed schedule and progress tracking template.

Handoff to Writing

When planning is complete, pass these artifacts to paper-writing:

Reference Navigation

Handoff to Presentation

If preparing a conference talk or slide deck, the academic-slides skill guides slide creation from your planning artifacts — including translating your story design and pipeline figure into presentation structure.