Is There A Formula For Writing a Research Paper?

Have research publications become a big game that academia play, and where everyone just follows a given formula? As a student you quickly learn that the peer review process involves packing in the references, defining your contribution, and then spend a good deal of time showing that you have put in some work to make the paper look good. A paper littered with typos and bad grammar, too, is unlikely to go anywhere.

I love the old “classic” papers which basically just outlined a new method and didn’t give you endless numbers of references. One of my favourite papers is by Fiat and Shamir [here][method]:

The chances of this getting through the review process now are probably low, as it has very few references and one of them is to the author’s:

But it is the defining paper for Zero-knowledge Proofs.

Many people think that undergraduate degrees are unlikely to create ideas that are ground breaking, but it is often not the case. Ralph, in 1974, pitched the…