How to Write a Real AI Research Paper (Final Playbook)

Goal: write a 3000 word paper people can cite
Time: 30 min per day for 60 days
Topic: how context quality affects LLM performance

0. What you are actually doing

You are not inventing new AI.

You are:

1. reading what others found
2. finding patterns
3. explaining them clearly
4. adding a simple framework

That is research.

1. Your paper in one sentence

Research question:

How does context quality affect LLM performance?

Claim:

In applied LLM systems, output quality depends more on context quality than model capability.

Do not change this later.

2. What context means

Context = everything the model sees before answering:

• prompts
• retrieved documents
• chat history
• memory
• tool outputs

Bad context = missing or messy info
Good context = the exact info needed

3. Your core idea

Context quality has 5 parts:

• Relevance = how much of the context is actually useful
• Recency = how up to date the info is
• Structure = how well the info is organized
• Density = signal vs noise
• Grounding = tied to real sources

This is your main contribution.

4. Your paper structure

1. Introduction
2. Related Work
3. Context Quality Framework
4. Discussion
5. Limitations
6. Conclusion
7. References

5. Your daily system

Days 1 to 3

Search and open these papers:

• Attention Is All You Need
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks
• Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts

For each paper write:

• what problem it studies
• what type of context it uses
• what changed in output

Only read abstract and skim.

Days 4 to 10

Read 2 papers per day.

Search terms:

• retrieval augmented generation
• long context LLM
• memory LLM systems

Make a table:

Paper | Context Type | Result | Insight

Look for patterns:

• better context improves output
• too much or messy context hurts output

Days 11 to 15

Define your 5 dimensions clearly.

Keep definitions simple and consistent.

Days 16 to 25

Write:

Context Quality Framework

Explain all 5 parts clearly

Target 800 words

This is the most important section.

Days 26 to 35

Write Introduction:

• AI is strong but still fails
• failures often come from bad context
• your claim about context quality

Target 400 to 500 words

Days 36 to 45

Write Related Work.

Group papers into:

• retrieval systems
• long context models
• memory systems

Compare findings instead of listing papers.

Days 46 to 50

Write Discussion.

Explain:

• why context quality matters
• how systems depend on it
• implications for real world systems

You can briefly mention tools like Ryva as an example of context systems.

Days 51 to 55

Write Limitations:

• no large scale experiments
• based mostly on existing research
• framework is conceptual

Then clean the paper:

• remove fluff
• shorten sentences
• keep definitions clear

Days 56 to 60

Use Overleaf:

https://www.overleaf.com

Write in LaTeX
Export PDF
Submit to arXiv:

https://arxiv.org

6. Rules

• do not try to sound smart
• do not predict the future
• do not write before reading
• do not pitch your product
• keep everything simple

7. What good looks like

Good:

• clear definitions
• simple structure
• real citations
• one strong idea

Bad:

• vague words
• big claims
• no evidence
• sounds like social media

8. Mental model

Think:

AI output depends more on what it sees than how big it is

If a smart engineer reads your paper and agrees, it works.

9. First action

Right now:

Write in a doc:

• your research question
• your claim
• your 5 dimensions

Then start Day 1.

If you want next: I can give you the exact next 10 papers and what insight to extract from each.