paper-planning

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