BREW 2008

Bioinformatics Research and Education Workshop, Bielefeld, Germany April 28-30 2008

Paper submission

All BREW participants will submit a paper that will be reviewed by other participants. Each participant will present his or her paper at the workshop. The paper should follow the guidelines given below. We will accept review, research or project plan papers, sent with an email to tobias.wittkop at cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de as a PDF file. No other formats will be accepted. The key dates regarding papers are:

  • March 1th -- Abstract submission deadline
  • March 7th -- Paper submission deadline
  • March 20th -- Review deadline
  • April 11th -- Deadline for final version of paper
  • April 28th -- Meeting in Bielefeld

Types of papers

Papers should present a method, an algorithm or results, but if you have just started a project you may not have something fully developed to present. In that case you can submit a review paper or a paper describing what you plan to do. Consult your local advisor in case of doubt. Review papers must give an introduction to the literature in your particular field, as your reviewer might not be familiar with your particular research field (this also goes for the other papers).

Paper requirements

The BREW workshop is meant to give the participants training in writing scientific papers. The papers should be 3-5 pages, shorter than a normal journal paper. Most journals and conferences will have their own, often very detailed requirements regarding how a paper is to be delivered, but the only requirement for this workshop is that the paper be delivered in the PDF format.

The following text covers the most typical sections in a scientific paper presenting a scientific result or method. Looking at the review guidelines when writing your paper can also be helpful, as your paper will be reviewed according to these guidelines. If you present a project plan, your paper does not need to have a result section, and you can either omit this section or comment on what kind of results you expect to get. Review papers will not be expected to have a result section either.

Abstract

Other researchers read the abstract to find out if this paper is interesting to them. The abstract is the only thing that appears when searching on line for scientific papers. All papers submitted to BREW must have a short abstract, around 100-200 words. This text should state what the paper is about and what the main findings of the work are. For this workshop, you should state what type of paper you have written in the abstract.

Introduction

This section should contain an introduction to the research field. Descriptions and references to the current state in your research field, competing methods and the scientific goal of the work presented are expected. The introduction should be between one half and one page. This is more brief than regular papers, but the introduction is none the less very important, and should contain references to relevant literature in the field, as your reader is not necessarily familiar with your field of research.

Methods

The method section should contain a description of the algorithm or method used in the paper, as well as descriptions of the data sets and databases used. How the method or algorithm is to be applied to find the desired result must also be stated. The descriptions should be sufficiently detailed so that other researchers can reproduce the results presented in the paper. The method section should be presented after the introduction.

Results

The results of the paper, preferably as tables and figures, are placed here. How the results were obtained in reference to the method section should also be explained.

Discussion and conclusion

This section should include explanations of your results, how your results compare to other methods and your methods contribution to the relevant research field. You should discuss the assumptions you have made for the work and the validity of your results, possible problems and their solution as well as possible objections to your method and results. If there is a disagreement in your field regarding methods or results and their interpretation, you should discuss how this may affect your results and whether your results may affect the disagreement. Try to present different points of view and cite the relevant literature.

References

All your references should be placed at the very end of the paper. Many journals have detailed instructions regarding the format of references, but for BREW we will require no special formatting, only that it is possible to uniquely identify each reference. You should at least include author(s), title, journal and the year of publication in the reference.