The road to writing a quality technical paper is tough because it is riddled with hard work and work that will be reviewed and criticized by your peers. The nice thing is that it is an incredibly rewarding road when it is done successfully. It is a feeling of great pleasure to see your work published in a journal after it has been critiqued and accepted by experts in the field. Also, one’s ability to interpret, discuss, evaluate, and write scholarly, technical literature is foundational to making it in a technically rich discipline. This presentation serves to enlighten one on what it means to produce a technical paper, and to understand the delta that exists between a trade study and a technical paper that would appear in a scholarly journal. This presentation will cover the standard sections of a technical paper and their value and importance, explain what is plagiarism and its growth and criticality to scholarly integrity, and introduce some tribal knowledge on writing a good technical paper that is never mentioned in any guide books.

Brian Sauser holds a B.S. from Texas A&M University in Agricultural Development with an emphasis in Horticulture Technology, a M.S. from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in Bioresource Engineering, and a Ph.D. from Stevens Institute of Technology in Project Management. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology and Before joining Stevens in 2005, he spent more than 12 years working in government, industry, and academia both as a researcher/engineer and director of programs. He has managed an applied research and development laboratory in life sciences and engineering at NASA Johnson Space Center; was Program Director of the New Jersey – NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training, where he managed a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary science and engineering research center working to generate new knowledge and technology for life support systems; and was a Project Specialist with ASRC Aerospace responsible for managing technology utilization and assessment, and commercial partnership development at NASA Kennedy Space Center.

His research interests are in the management of complex systems and defining a foundational science of systems thinking. This includes system and enterprise maturity assessment and the advancement of systems theory in the pursuit of a biology of systems. His work in systems theory with Dr. John Boardman has resulted in an insightful book, Systems Thinking: Coping with 21st Century Problems (see http://www.boardmansause.com). His work on system maturity assessment has been nationally recognized and adopted as a decision support tool by organizations within NASA, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Northrop Grumman, and  Lockheed Martin.

His work in System of Systems is nationally recognized and resulted in numerous referred publications and three book chapters. He is currently the Director of the Systomics Laboratory (http://www.SystomicsLab.com), which seeks to define a science of systems thinking, and the Systems Development and Maturity Laboratory  ttp://www.SystemReadinessLevel.com). He teaches courses in Project Management of Complex Systems, Designing and Managing the Development Enterprise, and Systems  hinking. In addition, he is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Faculty Fellow, Editor-in-Chief of the Systems Research Forum, an Associate Editor of the IEEE Systems Journal, and an Editor-in-Chief of the ICST Transactions on Systomics, Cybernetics, and e-Culture.