How to win a best paper award (or, an opinionated take on how to do important research that matters)
by Nicholas Carlini 2026-03-09
At EuroCrypt last week month year I was honored to receive a best paper award for a model stealing paper I wrote with my co-authors Jorge Chávez-Saab, Anna Hambitzer, Francisco Rodríguez-Henríquez, and Adi Shamir. While there, a few people asked what I do differently to win awards like this. I told them what I tell everyone: honestly I don't really know and it's mostly just luck. And while I do think this is true to a large extent (whether any particular paper wins an award is mostly luck), it's clearly not all down to luck, and I thought I actually owe it to others to give a more actionable response. So this is my attempt at that.
More generally, this article covers my process (for my field! yours may differ.), and gives an opinionated perspective on how research should be performed, and how papers should be written. I'll break this post out into roughly four sections:
coming up with a good research idea performing good technical research writing understandable and compelling papers ... and then what happens afterwards
Coming up with your best-paper-worthy idea
Have good taste for problems
The single most important skill to develop for high-impact research is good taste in what problems are worth solving. If you have good taste, and you keep writing papers, eventually you'll write one with exceptionally high impact. But if you have bad taste, you could write a hundred papers and never do anything of consequence.
Researchers who have developed good taste find clever and elegant approaches, and find themselves pulled toward solutions that feel "right" before they can fully articulate why. At a macro scale, they pick problems that will matter; at a micro scale, they take approaches likely to succeed. And perhaps most importantly, they make these decisions early, before wasting months of effort.
People who haven't refined their taste frequently spend months on problems that don't matter, or take approaches doomed from the start. They write papers that are technically correct but that no one reads, because they never asked whether the question was worth answering.
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