How and How Not to Write a Good Systems Paper (1983)

An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions

or How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper On March 21, 1983, the program committee for the 9th Symposium on Operating System Principles, having read the eighty-three papers submitted, selected sixteen for presentation at the symposium. Perhaps the most common failing among the submissions in the first category (real systems) was an absence of new ideas; the systems described were frequently isomorphic to one of a small number of pioneering systems well-documented in the literature. Since construction of a real system is a lot of work, the author of the paper sometimes unconsciously confuses the total effort with the work that is actually new.

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