学术论文Introduction部分的书写

英文论文的Introduction部分很重要：

Introduction部分应该包含以下三个部分

1. 问题的背景介绍

   在这部分，你应该清晰地说明你研究的问题的背景是什么。 最好给出近年来该问题在学术领域的发展情况。 但，也不能过长，简洁为主。最要控制在一页内。对于一般15页的学术论文，该部分占一半的篇幅已经足够。

2. 问题本身

    如果没有问题存在的意义，那就没必要写论文了，因为完全没理由看这样的文章。因此，应该告诉审稿人为什么他应该看你写的东西。 一句简单的话像“到目前为止，还没有人研究过这样的问题...”或“以上提到的方法不适合这种情况....”，有时这就足够表明你想表达的原因。经验表明，几行就足以说明这部分了。

3. 提出的方法

    现在，写到这里，你应该列出你论文的贡献点。写清楚你的创新点。因为关于这个问题可能有成千上万的人提出了方法，你不可能希望审稿人知道所有的方法。因此，突出你自己方法与别人方法不一样的地方很重要。这也是你花时间的地方，但是我建议避免过多的细节描述。

以下两部分可以结合具体情况决定是否添加：

4. 实验结论

    这一部分不是很好添加。我认为这部分只有当你有一个强有力的结论时才添加。如你决定把这部分包括到Introduction中去，你应该尽量保持简洁，尽量添加相应的其他部分的引用，并与Introduction中的其他部分区分开来。

5. 相关工作

    我的建议是把这部分放在论文的结束，除非有更好的理由这样做。举一个把相关工作放在Introduction中的例子，这篇文章包括了相当多的相关工作，并且你想立刻说明你的方法与其他人的不同。...

6. 论文概要

    我个人认为，对于长文，这部分很有用。否则就是浪费纸张。

两个额外的Tips：

保持每小部分的独立性。

保持简洁。删除那些没必要的废话。

原文地址：http://www.win.tue.nl/~setalle/introduction.html

A Recipe for Writing an Introduction

An Introduction should contain the following three parts:


1. Background.
In this part you have to make clear what the context is. Ideally, you should give an idea of the state-of-the art of the field the report is about. But keep it short: in my opinion this part should be less than a page long. Half a page should suffice in case of a normal 15-pages article.
2. The Problem.
If there was no problem, there would be no reason for writing a report, and definitely no reason for reading it. So, please tell the reviewer  why she should proceed reading.  A simple sentence like "So far  no-one has investigated the link..." or "The above-mentioned solutions don't apply to the case ...", can sometimes be enough to clarify the point you want to get at. Experience shows that for this part a few lines are often sufficient.
3. The Proposed Solution.

Now - and only now! - you may outline the contribution of the report. Here you have to make sure you point out what are the novel aspects of your work. There are probably zillions of articles out there on that very subject: you can't expect the reviewer to know them all; so make his life easier and clearly highlight what is the difference between your method and the others. You can take your time here, but I suggest to avoid getting into too much detail.

In addition there can be the following optional ingredients:
4. An anticipation of the conclusions
This is very difficult to do properly. I think that this part should be there only in reports that have a strong position-statement nature. If you decide to include this into the introduction, you might want to (a) keep it as short as possible, (b) refer as much as possible to the concluding section, and (c) keep it well separated from the rest of the introduction.
5. Related work
My suggestion is to postpone this part to the end of the paper, unless there are good reasons for doing otherwise. For instance, one good reason for not following this suggestion is the presence in the literature of a very prominent related work, in which case you might want to give immediately an idea of what are the differences between your work and the prominent one. In general, though, I  find it much easier to have a related works section at the end of the report: one reads it when he has already a good idea of the technical contribution. In this case, include in the introduction a line saying "Related works are discussed in Section ...".
6. The outline (plan of the paper)
Personally, I find it useful only for long reports, otherwise I think it is a waste of paper. But this is my very personal opinion.
Two Extra Tips
Keep the parts well separated.
Introductions in which parts 1&2&3 are not clearly separated from each other are usually very annoying, and are certainly much more demanding to the reviewer in terms concentration and energy. Use "itemize", if possible: it helps.
Keep it short.
Removing everything that is not really necessary is often a very effective strategy for improving an introduction.