Your first paper, end to end

Everyone’s first paper feels impossible. Not because any single step is hard, but because nobody shows you the whole pipeline at once. So here it is: the entire journey on one page, with a lesson linked for every stage. Bookmark this and cross steps off as you go.

The roadmap

Stage	What you do	Typical time	Start here
1. Understand the game	Learn what a paper is and how one is built	A weekend	What is a research paper?, Paper anatomy tour
2. Read and collect	Read related work, save every reference you touch	2-4 weeks, ongoing	Add citations
3. Pick the venue	Choose a target and its deadline. This sets your clock	A few days	Choose your venue, The deadline lifecycle
4. Set up the project	Venue template, Git from day one	An afternoon	Your first document, Sync with GitHub
5. Do the work + write	Research and writing interleave. Write early, badly, often	The bulk: 1-3 months	Write an abstract
6. Figures and citations	Make figures readable, get the bibliography clean	1-2 weeks	Add citations
7. Internal review	A co-author or friend reads the full draft cold	1 week before freeze	Peer review, explained
8. Polish and fit	Cut, tighten, hit the page limit honestly	Final week	Page limits without crimes
9. Submit	Metadata, PDF upload, done a day early	1 day (plan for 2)	Submission systems tour
10. Rebut	Respond to reviews with evidence	A few intense days	Rebuttals and revisions
11. Camera-ready	The final, permanent version	1-2 weeks after acceptance	Camera-ready without panic
12. Present	Talk, poster, hallway conversations	The conference	Talks, posters, and the conference
13. Share	Post the preprint, release the code	A day	Posting to arXiv

Timeline expectations

First papers usually take 6 to 12 months from idea to submission, and that is normal, not slow. Rejection along the way is also normal: many excellent papers were rejected once or twice before landing. Each cycle through steps 9 and 10 makes the paper stronger.

Two habits compress the timeline more than anything else:

• Write from week one. Notes become paragraphs become sections. Nobody writes a paper in the last two weeks; they assemble one.
• Keep history. Commit early and often so no experiment or paragraph is ever truly lost. A local-first workspace like Oleafly gives you real Git checkpoints and diffs without leaving the editor, which turns “I broke the draft” into “I restored yesterday’s version.”

The encouraging truth

The pipeline looks long because it is complete. But it is a loop, not a maze: the same 13 steps, every paper, for your entire career. Your first pass through will be slow and confusing. Your second will be merely slow. By the third, you will be the labmate explaining AoE deadlines to someone else.

Pick a venue, put the deadline on your calendar, and start at step 1. The loop is learnable, and you have a map now.