Management for Engineers

Guide to preparing papers for submission for Mid term assessment – 0455-560 Management for Engineers

1. Other¹

¹College of Engineering, University of Sharjah

The writing of papers is only the first step to publishing.  Getting a paper included in conference proceedings or in the school journal [Northumbria Built and Virtual Environment Working Paper Series] involves authors in editing and laying out their own papers.  Precise specifications for laying out the paper help to reduce the work of the conference organizers in compiling the proceedings.  Font sizes, paragraph formats and other details are specified so that proceedings can be presented in a consistent and professional style.  This document is formatted according to the guidelines, in order to provide an example for authors.

Keywords: five keywords, chosen from a prescribed list, in lower case and alphabetical sequence separated by commas, finishing with full-stop.

INTRODUCTION

Papers for this assignment should occupy no more than ten pages of A4, formatted according to the guidelines in this document.

Each element of the document is formatted according to particular styles, which are defined by Microsoft Word in the template of the document.  If you use this document as a basis for formatting your paper, all the styles you need will be available to you.  The text of the document is in Body Text.  The application of these styles is actually more important than their appearance, because any future change to the style definition automatically changes all text to which that particular style has already been applied.  This makes the re-formatting of documents extremely easy and, more important, it aids consistency.

Structure of the document

The title of the paper should be specific, making clear what the paper is about without demanding that the paper be read in order to ascertain its contents.  Although it should appear in upper-case, the style (Heading 2) will force all text to appear upper case.  Please type it lower case (except for the initial letter and proper nouns), as this will help us with the indexing of the proceedings.

The format of the title should be Heading 2, as Heading 1 is reserved for section headings in the proceedings.  Therefore, the main headings of your paper will begin at the level of Heading 3, and sub-headings will be Heading 4, and sub-sub-headings will be Heading 5.  Please do not go lower than sub-sub-headings.  If necessary, use bullet points increasing levels of detail below sub-sub-headings.

Authors and authorship

The authors should be listed, separated by commas, except for the last one, which will be separated with the word “and”.  Only use superscripts to identify different addresses.  If all the authors are from the same institution, then superscripts are not necessary.  The e-mail address of authors may be given as footnotes, in which case, please select “Options” when you are applying the footnote and set footnote numbering to re-start at the beginning of each section.  Please do not put a full-stop at the end of the authors.

Authorship should respect the rights of those involved in the production of the paper.  The person who wrote most of the text should be the first-named author, even if this is a student.  The sequence of authors should reflect the magnitude of each person’s contribution to the text of the particular paper.  Supervisors, grant-holders and heads of department should not automatically be added as authors unless they took part in the writing of the paper.  If a junior person wrote the paper, and a senior person helped with the editing, structuring and drafting, the senior person should be acknowledged in the acknowledgements, but merely helping to guide someone through the writing process does not warrant authorship.

Addresses

The address or addresses should follow the sequence of the author.  Please include the country, using UK rather than GB, England, United Kingdom.

Writing informative abstracts

Abstracts are often the least considered but most important part of any paper. Most readers of a journal or conference proceedings will read most of the abstracts, but very few will read the full papers. Perhaps 95% of readers will read only the abstract. The need for abstracts to be terse often causes difficulty and can taint what is otherwise a perfectly acceptable style of writing.  Certain problems are common.  Some of the recommendations here are based upon accepted good practice in abstract writing; others are simply a question of style or consistency. The following suggestions should help to reduce the need for authors to re-write their abstracts.

The abstract should not be a table of contents in prose; neither should it be an introduction. It should be informative. Tell the reader what the research was about, how it was undertaken and what was discovered, but not how the paper is organized. The main findings must be summarized. If there are too many of them, then just exemplify them in the abstract. The essential elements of the abstract are:

• Background: A simple opening sentence or two placing the work in context.
• Aims: One or two sentences giving the purpose of the work.
• Method(s): One or two sentences explaining what was done.
• Results: One or two sentences indicating the main findings.
• Conclusions: One sentence giving the most important consequence of the work.

The following guidelines have been extracted from recent criticisms of real abstracts.  This may help to overcome some of the most frequent problems:

• Do not commence with “this paper…”, “this report…” or similar. It is better to write about the research than about the paper. Similarly, do not explain the sections or parts of the paper.
• Avoid sentences that end in “…is described”, “…is reported”, “…is analysed” or similar. These are simply too vague to be informative.
• Do not begin sentences with “it is suggested that…”, “it is believed that…”, “it is felt that…” or similar. In every case, the four words can be omitted without damaging the essential message.
• Do not write in the first person in any form. Thus, not only should you avoid “I”, but also “we”, “the author”, “the writer” and so on. Again, this is because the abstract should be about the research, not about the act of writing.

Finally, here is a spoof abstract which contains some of the worst practices in abstract writing:

This paper discusses research that was undertaken in the author’s country. A theoretical framework is developed from a literature search and this is used by the authors as the basis of an analytical model. The researchers collected data within this framework and analysed it according to the precepts laid down by earlier researchers in the field. The data is used to demonstrate that our understanding can be significantly increased and this is discussed in the light of previous work. Conclusions are drawn and it is shown that these may be useful for practitioners.

Keywords

The keywords should help with indexing, so that other researchers might discover your paper by consulting an index of keywords.  In a conference on construction management, it would seem somewhat pointless to include “project management” as a keyword.  Similarly, there is not much point in using “building industry” as a keyword.  Therefore, avoid keywords that are so vague that they would suit every paper in the conference.  On the other hand, some keywords are too specific and only one paper (yours) would appear next to an entry for such a keyword.  We need to strike a balance.  Keywords should generally be words, not phrases.  It may be helpful to choose from a list of recommended keywords for this topic.  Although this is not mandatory, Table 1 provides a list of suggested keywords that have been found to be useful and pitched at the right level between vague and unique.  For the purposes of this assignment, there is a fixed list of nearly 1,000 keywords provided on the conference paper submission web-site.

The list of keywords should be preceded by the “Keywords:” and then listed alphabetically, separated by commas, with a full-stop at the end.  Please do not select more than five keywords.

INTRODUCTION of the paper

Begin the paper with statements introducing the general area and the reason that this work is important.  Explain what was important about the particular approach and how this work relates to previous work in the field.

Sub-heading

It is helpful to break the argument into steps by the use of sub-headings.  In a paper of this length, there is little to be gained from going to further levels of sub-sub-heading.  With only two levels, heading numbering is not needed.

Tables

Tables should be kept as simple as possible.  Make sure that they are referred to from the text (see Table 2).  Omit vertical lines from tables and omit grey shading and 3D effects from all tables, charts and figures.  They do not photocopy well and frequently obscure the real message.  Do not use excessive accuracy in reporting measurements and statistics.  Percentages are best as whole numbers.  Generally, two or three significant figures are adequate.

Table 2: An example of setting out a table with column headings

The style for Table and Figure captions should be Normal, reduced to 11 pt, and the style for column headings and table text should be Normal, reduced to 10 pt.  Column headings should be in bold typeface.

figures

Figures should be kept as simple as possible.  Figures should be used where relevant, but do not use them excessively.  Make sure that they are referred to from the text and that they are not too complicated or large.  If your work relies on the presentation of complex graphics, then the paper can make a point with an extract from a larger graphic.  3D effects are an unnecessary distraction.  Colour will be lost in the reproduction of the proceedings and causes images to occupy a lot more disk space than monochrome.  Please so not include screen shots of computer displays.  It is better to render the relevant information into a simpler graphic or chart.

Pie charts

Pie charts are generally unnecessary as the information can be presented in one sentence of text.  If a pie chart has more than can be presented in a sentence of text, it would be better as a histogram.

Histograms (bar charts)

Histograms should be laid out without an external border; the font for text should be set to Times New Roman 12 point.  The bars should not be too far apart (this may need adjusting to reduce the white space between them, although there should be some white space).  Grid lines should be used only sparingly.  The bars should be white.  If more than one data set is represented, the second one should be black.  If several data sets are represented, each should have different cross-hatching.  Grey shading should be avoided as it reproduces badly.

Citation of references

Bibliographical data varies depending upon the kind of source being cited.  Listed below are the elements that should be included in a reference to each of the most common types of publication.  Within the text of the document, work and ideas can be cited using the author’s surname and year of publication.  This enables it to be looked up in the list of references at the end of the paper, sorted alphabetically, by authors’ surnames, and presented without bullets or numbers.  If the author’s name is not part of the phrasing of the sentence, then it will be in brackets with the year (Hughes 2002) whereas if you are using the author’s name as part of the text of the sentence, then only the year is in brackets.  When citing author and year together, there is no need to separate them with a comma.  The precise location within the source material can be given as page number(s) after a colon (Hughes 2002: 34-36).

Referencing a book

1. Name(s) of author(s)/editor(s) Surname first, followed by initials, but without full-stops after initials. (If editors, add Ed. or Eds., as appropriate, in brackets)
2. Year of publication, in brackets, with no punctuation after it.
3. Title of the book in italics, followed by full-stop.
4. Edition, if not the first
5. Place of publication followed by colon
6. Name of publisher
7. Number of volumes, if more than one

Examples:

Burns, T and Stalker, G M (1966) The management of innovation. London: Tavistock.

Walker, A (1996) Project management in construction. 3ed. Oxford: Blackwell Science.

Referencing a paper/chapter in a book

1. Name(s) of author(s) of the paper/chapter, surname first, followed by initials, but without full-stops after initials.
2. Year of publication, in brackets (no full-stop or comma after it)
3. Title of the paper or chapter (not in italics)
4. Editor(s) of the book, prefaced with the word In: and followed by Ed. or Eds. in brackets.
5. Title of the book in italics.
6. Volume number, part number, where applicable.
7. Place of publication.
8. Name of publisher.

Example:

Flint, F.O. (1984) Advances in light microscopy of foods. In: G.G. Birch and K.J. Parker, (Eds.) Control of food quality and food analysis. London: Elsevier Applied Science Publishers.

Referencing an article in a periodical

1. Name(s) of author(s) of the article.
2. Year of publication, in brackets (no full-stop or comma after it).
3. Title of article.
4. Full title of the periodical (or an accepted abbreviation, as given in the World List of Scientific Periodicals, but the full title is preferred).
5. Volume number, in bold
6. Issue number, in brackets. You don’t always have to give the issue number, if pages in issues within the volume are numbered consecutively, but for those journals where each issue re-starts at page 1, it is essential.
7. Page numbers.

Example:

Wantanakorn, D, Mawdesley, M J and Askew, W H (1999) Management errors in construction. Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, 6(2), 112-20.

Reference to a thesis

1. Name of author.
2. Year of publication, in brackets.
3. Title of thesis, in italics.
4. Type of degree (e.g. PhD or MSc) usually: Unpublished PhD thesis.
5. Name of the Department.
6. Name of the University.

Example:

El-Askari Khaled Mohamed, S (2000) A methodology for expenditure planning of irrigation infrastructure using hydraulic modelling techniques, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Department of Engineering, University of Southampton.

Reference to a paper in a conference

1. Author(s) of the paper.
2. Year of publication in brackets (no full-stop or comma after it).
3. Title of the paper or chapter (not in italics).
4. Editor(s) of the conference proceedings, prefaced with the word In: and followed by Ed. or Eds. in brackets.
5. Title of the conference in italics.
6. Date of conference.
7. Location of conference.
8. Publisher of Proceedings.
9. Volume number, part number, where applicable.
10. Start and end page numbers of the whole paper.

Example:

Ashton, P and Gidado, K (2001) Risk associated with inadequate site investigation procedures under design and build procurement systems. In: Akintoye, A (Ed.), 17th Annual ARCOM Conference, 5-7 September 2001, University of Salford. Association of Researchers in Construction Management, Vol. 1, 961-9.

Of course, if you use bibliographical software, such as EndNote, available from www.endnote.com, all of this formatting will be done for you.  An appropriate style file for EndNote is available from the conference web site.

Conclusions

Every paper should finish with conclusions, explaining the discoveries of the research and its impact.   The conclusion should follow from the work that was done.  New material should not be introduced in the conclusions, although it is often useful to refer back to earlier section so of the paper to show how the questions posed at the beginning have been answered.

References

The list of references should be laid out as detailed in these guidance notes, using the style References, and with one reference per paragraph (no blank paragraphs are needed between them).