The Seven W's

All the steps below should be present in a scientific paper. After reading a paper, the reviewer should be able to answer these questions to a degree, anything missing might point to an issue in the paper.

What is the problem?

Define the problem and its context.

Why is it important?

Describe why the problem is important and to who it is important.

What have other people done about the problem?

Survey the literature for the problem, describing the state of the art in detail. People generally write a conceptual framework to categorize previous research.

Why is it not sufficient?

Usually part of the introduction or related work, describes why the problem is still not solved, either from a theoretical or practical standpoint. There could be many deficits and people only describe the ones relevant to their paper.

What do you propose?

This is the main content of the paper, describing the proposed technique, theoretical framework, or research idea and concepts.

Why is it better?

Corresponds to the evaluation section of the paper (experimental or theoretical), and contains the main body of results that argue why the proposed technique is better.

What is left to be done?

Corresponds to the analysis of results and conclusion/future work sections.