Computer Science
Writing CS papers: related work, systems, and blind review
Conference-first publishing, related-work positioning, double-blind self-citation, and artifact appendices — how computer science papers are written.
- Usual citation style
- IEEE style
- What you will be writing
- Peer-reviewed conference papers within a strict page limit · System-description papers for a tool or platform · Empirical evaluation papers benchmarking an approach · Position papers and workshop submissions · Artifact and reproducibility appendices · Technical reports and preprints posted before review · Rebuttals during an author-response period
FIELD CONVENTIONS
What computer science expects of a manuscript
Generic writing advice stops here. These are the conventions reviewers in this field actually apply.
- The conference is the venue of record, not the journal
- Top computer science conferences are peer-reviewed with acceptance decisions that count for careers, and journals often come second. This shapes the writing: a fixed deadline, a fixed page count, and a paper that must be self-contained because there is no revise-and-resubmit in most cycles.
- Related work positions your paper, it does not survey the field
- The section exists to say what the nearest three or four systems do and precisely where yours differs. Every paragraph should end in a contrast; a neutral summary of prior work leaves a reviewer wondering what is new.
- Double-blind review changes how you cite yourself
- Under anonymous submission you cite your own earlier work in the third person — “Prior work [7] introduced…” — never “our previous system [7].” Anonymizing repository links and institution names in the artifact is part of the same obligation.
- Tense splits between the system and the experiments
- A system is described in the present tense because it exists — “the scheduler batches requests.” The evaluation is past tense because you ran it — “we measured throughput across five workloads.” Mixing them makes it unclear what is a design claim and what is a measurement.
- Claims about performance need the setup that reproduces them
- Hardware, dataset versions, hyperparameters, and the number of runs with variance belong in the evaluation, not in a footnote. Artifact evaluation tracks at many venues will check that a reader can rebuild what you describe.
- Algorithms and complexity get formal treatment
- Pseudocode appears in a numbered float with a caption, and complexity claims are stated in standard asymptotic notation with the assumptions they rest on. If a bound holds only in the average case, the sentence has to say so.
THE FRICTION
Where the writing actually slows down
What gets in the way
- A hard page limit that arrives at the same time as the deadline
- Anonymizing a paper and its artifact without making the contribution unreadable
- A related-work section that summarizes instead of contrasting
- Writing a rebuttal to three reviewers with conflicting objections inside a character limit
- Papers written in LaTeX by convention while collaborators work in a word processor
- Non-native English drafting under a deadline where a reviewer notes “needs proofreading”
How the workflow runs in Copyeditor
- Outline against the template’s page budget — Plan mode allocates sections before drafting, so evaluation and related work get their space instead of being cut at 3am.
- Draft with IEEE citations attached — IEEE is formatted automatically, so bracketed numbers and the reference list stay correct as you insert sources during a deadline sprint.
- Tighten language, keep the claim — Edit mode compresses paragraphs to fit, and grammar review catches the register issues that draw a “needs proofreading” review score.
- Check, export, and document — Run the AI-detector preview before submission, export to PDF or Word, and keep the Authorship Certificate as a record of how the paper was written.
CITATION SHORTCUTS
IEEE formats you will need most
Questions from computer science writers
Is there LaTeX or Overleaf export?
No. Copyeditor exports Word and PDF. Many CS venues require a LaTeX template, so a common pattern is drafting the prose here and moving it into the template for typesetting.
Does it support ACM reference format?
Not directly. The supported styles are APA, MLA, Chicago, and IEEE. IEEE numeric is structurally close to ACM’s numeric format, so it is the practical starting point.
Can I use an AI co-writer on a double-blind submission?
Check the venue’s policy — most permit language assistance and require disclosure while prohibiting AI as an author. The Authorship Certificate documents how the draft was produced if you are asked.
How do I write a rebuttal that helps?
Group reviewer concerns by theme, address the ones that would change the decision first, and state concretely what you will change. Arguing every point equally wastes a limited character budget.
Guides worth reading next
Compressing a whole paper into 250 useful words
Four moves — background, method, result, implication — with the result sentence doing most of the work.
From the wide field to your specific question, in about a page
Establish the territory, name the gap, state the question — and stop before it becomes a review.
Writing a revision letter that gets your paper accepted
Answer every comment, show where each change landed, and disagree with reasons rather than irritation.
When the passive is the right choice — and when it is not
Voice is a choice about what the sentence should be about. The passive is correct whenever the actor is irrelevant, and wrong whenever it conceals who did something.
Neighboring fields
Academic writing in engineering
IEEE numbers references [1], [2], [3] as they first appear, and the number is reused for every later mention. The number behaves like a noun in a sentence — “as shown in [4]” — which is why inserting a source mid-draft renumbers everything after it.
Academic writing in linguistics
Example sentences are set off, numbered sequentially as (1), (2), with sub-items lettered (3a), (3b), and the prose refers back to them rather than repeating the string. Every numbered example must be discussed somewhere in the text, or a reviewer will ask why it is there.
Academic writing in economics
Economics introductions run four to six pages and tell the reader the question, the data, the identification, the headline estimate, and the contribution — in that order, before any suspense can build. Withholding the finding for effect is read as a sign the finding is weak.
Built for the paper
you are actually writing
Structured drafting, citations that build their own reference list, and an Authorship Certificate that records how the document came together. Copyeditor is in beta — apply and we’ll reach out as spots open.
