Generating Research Highlights for the Web Site

TCM encourages its researchers to summarise their (better) papers in the form of "Research Highlights". These should be written in a form accessible to a wide scientific audience, and are intended to advertise both the research of the Group, and of the individuals concerned.

We have part of our web site dedicated to these, and we have a simple, flexible, but reasonably uniform format for them.

A single html file, and a single image (optional), should be prepared, and then the command

web_highlights -n file.html

run to add a new research highlight to your collection on the web, copying the provided file.

The idea is to produce something similar to the summary that the APS requires for some of its journals. The abstract, conclusion, and full text of your paper are already presumably on line (probably on the arXiv), so there is no point in repeating those verbatim. Rather I repeat below some advice copied from the APS website:

1. Put a newspaper-style headline at the top of your text to summarize the result
2. Be brief. 200 words is usually enough. Shorter summaries are usually better because they include fewer details that tend to distract from the main points. (We would add that the web page should be viewable without scrollbars on a standard desktop or laptop.)
3. Try to get to the "bottom line" in the first sentence or two before stepping back to go over background information. Think of the way a newspaper article is written, with the most important points at the top.
4. Aim your summary at the general public, not physicists. Using this style helps the editors to visualize how the topic could be presented to a general audience. Avoid or define any jargon. State why your result is important in direct terms, even if it seems obvious.

The mechanics

The file provided to the web_highlights command should be written in a subset of HTML. It should start with a title within an <h2> tag, be followed by an author list, and then text. An image can be included in a figure. In this case the <img tag and the src= entry must be on the same line, and the image should be in the same directory that web_highlights is run from - the assumption is that one will create a directory such as ~/highlights and work within that.

A basic template would be:

<h2>A short, engaging, title</h2>

<p class="authors">Author list, with links to profiles / personal pages
  as appropriate.</p>

<p>Some text, marked up in the usual HTML fashion, briefly describing
  one's work to a general audience.</p>

<figure>
  <img src="croc_dima.png"
       alt="some text to aid screen-readers for the blind" />
  <figcaption>An optional figure caption. If the image is a bitmap, it should be no
    more than 800 pixels wide, and should be readable when 350 pixels wide.</figcaption>
</figure>

<p>Some more text. This will appear to the left of the figure, and eventually
  flowing down below it. Multiple paragraphs are fine.</p>

<p>The text should end with a reference to the full publication. The form used
  in one's web profile is fine, save that there is no list, so omit
  <li> and </li>.</p>

The image should be PNG or JPEG as appropriate. Most HTML markup is fine, save for <h1>. Free free to browse ~mjr19/highlights for examples, including a template. (To download a template, use this link, not the above page which will have the full menu structure inserted.)

For full details of how to use web_highlights to add, modify, delete, and exclude from the index page your highlights, see its full documentation. Older highlights which can be dated to anything from 1/1/2010 onwards are currently supported, see the --date option.