Some Needed Research on Writing

Some aphorisms on research and writing.

When Dr. Giebisch called to ask me to speak at this dinner celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Salt and Water Club, I violated a long standing principle. I said yes immediately over the phone, rather than giving his offer the mature consideration it deserved. After-dinner speaking is definitely not my forte. Then when Dr. Levitin called to reinforce the invitation, I asked him what I should...

Needed: Global Collaboration for Comparative Research on Cities and Health

Over half of the world’s population lives in cities and United Nations (UN) demographers project an increase of 2.5 billion more urban dwellers by 2050. Yet there is too little systematic comparative research on the practice of urban health policy and management (HPAM), particularly in the megacities of middle-income and developing nations. We make a case for creating a global database on citie...

Some Advice on Writing (Algorithmic) Papers

The introduction. The introduction usually starts with a description of and a motivation for the general problem area. After introducing the general problem area, you zoom in to the specific problem studied in the paper. I like to already discuss previous work here. This way you can explain where the specific problem fits into the state-of-the-art and why it is interesting. Ideally, the discuss...

Much more research needed on injury prevention.

Writing smart: Writing quality research papers

The difficulty faced (by many) in reading a large fraction of the scientific literature is not, as is generally perceived, due to the complexity of scientific concepts, but is due to these difficult-to-read documents being poorly written. Scientific documents, however, need not be difficult to read, or even to write. In the rest of this article, we attempt to provide some insight into what goes...