The claim sentence

Lesson 2 of 3 · 2 min

Almost every paper has one sentence it exists to prove. Find it first, and write it down in your own words before you read further.

Where it hides

At the end of the introduction, often in a list of "contributions".
After words like "we show", "we propose", "we demonstrate", "our results suggest".
In a shorter form in the abstract, usually in the middle.

Topic versus claim

A topic is what a paper is about. A claim is what it says is true. You can test a claim. You cannot test a topic.

Topic	Claim
This paper is about translation.	A model built only on attention translates better than older models, and trains faster.
This paper is about deep networks.	Adding shortcut connections lets much deeper networks train well and reach lower error.

This paper is about translation.: Claim: A model built only on attention translates better than older models, and trains faster.

This paper is about deep networks.: Claim: Adding shortcut connections lets much deeper networks train well and reach lower error.

A real example

In 2017, Vaswani and colleagues introduced the Transformer in "Attention Is All You Need". Their claim had two parts: the new model gave better translation quality on standard English–German and English–French tests, and it needed far less training time. So a careful reader checks the results for both parts, not just one.

Notice the strength words

Claims come with strength words. "We prove" is stronger than "we show", which is stronger than "our results suggest". Check that the evidence matches the word. A small experiment with "we prove" is a warning sign.

RememberBefore page two, write the claim in one sentence. After each section, ask: did this help the claim, or not?