What is a White Paper?

Introduction

Starting this spring 2020 semester at Purdue, I am continuing my capstone course in UAS. Last semester my group began and made great progress in research and experimentation with search and rescue missions aided by UASs. To continue that, we will be doing much more research and analysis this semester, with the goal of writing either a white paper or peer-reviewed publication.

Before starting on our literature, we have to answer the question of “what is a white paper?” I’ll be examining that question, analyzing the similarities and differences between a white paper and peer-reviewed literature, and listing pros and cons for each. Finally, I’ll be critiquing a few examples of white papers, and describe how I’ll be moving forward with my writing for the semester.

What is a white paper?

In short, a white paper is an authoritative document about a complex subject. Purdue’s Online Writing Lab says it is typically used to argue a position or propose a solution to a problem.^[1] The main difference between white papers and peer-reviewed articles, of course, is that the scientific community reviews the latter in order to add something to the currently available information on a topic. However, both white papers and peer-reviewed publications are trying to spread information about a given topic. They go about doing it in different ways, but the goals are similar.

Going over some of the pros and cons of each, white papers are much quicker to push to the public than peer-reviewed articles because they don’t require community review. However, this also means that the information present in them may not be as thorough or accurate as in top tier peer-reviewed journals. ^[2] White papers often don’t include any substantial amount of data. They may use information gathered from scholarly papers to draw their conclusions, but they don’t do a ton of the statistical legwork themselves. ^[3]Research papers are often expensive, though, as publishing in proper journals costs quite a bit of money. ^[4] White papers are more self-marketed than peer-reviewed articles because of the distinct lack of journal publishing ability. They are often published by the organization that authored it. ^[5] Because of this, it’s a bit harder to get your white paper out to a widespread academic audience, if that’s your goal. Both forms have their benefits, it really comes down to what kind of research you have, and how you want to show off that research.

White Paper Critiques

Steinbauer, Gerald. (2014). TEDUSAR White Book - State of the Art in Search and Rescue Robots. 10.13140/RG.2.1.4086.9361.

Starting at the beginning, the introduction to this paper tells the reader very little about what is specifically being discussed in the paper. The topic here seems to be much more broad than a traditional research paper would be. When talking about aerial vehicles, he misspells the word aerial as “areal”, showing that much less time was spent editing and perfecting this paper than something an author may submit for peer-review. This paper focuses almost entirely on ideas that SAR could utilize; it doesn’t actually do any scientific research about the ideas. There is no data to back up the authors’ claims. However, they do provide a lot of base-level information about many different types of UAV platforms, as well as UGV, UUV, and USVs. Different sensors and their potential uses are covered as well.

Towards the end of the article it is revealed that the project team did do some actual field-testing missions, focusing on the effectiveness of cheap versus expensive sensors to perform their task using various platforms. Unfortunately, and I believe this to be a likely critique of mine for the next white papers as well, little to no data was given based on these missions. The best I saw was that the platforms were able to complete the mission within the timeframe they gave themselves. Overall, this paper gave a great amount of detail about what unmanned vehicles can do in search and rescue operations, gave great descriptions of how various sensors and software can be used, but it lacked any hard evidence to support that the platforms actually are helpful. It seems like they are leaving that portion up to the reader to go experiment further, integrate unmanned systems into their SAR program, and see what happens.

Applications of Satellite-AIS (S-AIS) for Search and Rescue. ExactEarth, 2013, https://www.exactearth.com/applications/search-and-rescue

This white paper discusses the SAR techniques used by sea vessels through satellite identification and communication systems. Unlike the first paper, this one seems much more business oriented. It’s obvious that they are pushing their own technology as the main drive for writing this paper. There is a lot of good information present in the article, but by the second sentence of the first paragraph of the article they are already plugging their own services and technology. Much of the research I did revealed as much about white papers; how they are often written by the businesses that publish them in order to push their own products. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a clear bias in the paper that they are going to do their best to prove that their service is the one to beat. It’s difficult to get a full picture of the field because of the heavy focus on their own agenda. This isn’t to say that there’s no information, or bad information, just that you have to think about the fact that they have an agenda that may not be perfectly in line with your own. And once again, unlike a traditional research paper, there is little data or science available in the article, just ideas and information about S-AIS.

Understanding Search & Rescue: The Ecosystem Behind Saving Lives. McMurdo, 2015, www.oroliamaritime.com/mg-content-library/white-paper-understanding-search-rescue/.

This last article takes a broader scope than the previous two, talking about the search and rescue system as a whole, while still focusing in on satellite usage within the SAR scene. This paper does a better job of laying out the story than the previous two. Rather than just blindly giving information on a subject, there is a very clear outline for the paper. The procedures followed in SAR missions dictates the chronology of this paper. First talking about distress beacons being activated in an emergency, followed by satellite communication, ground station input, mission control, and rescue. Though the information is laid out in a more easily digestible manner in this paper, it’s still just information. I know that this is the point of a white paper, but I’m much more drawn to the statistics, data, and overall research effort that goes into a peer-reviewed journal article.

If you want information on a topic, and fairly thorough information, each of these papers does a great job at that. But if you want something more in-depth, a bit more statistical, more meaningful, peer-reviewed papers are the way to go.

Conclusion

As far as how my writing will transpire this semester, there’s multiple ways it could go. I’m a lot more interested in writing a paper for peer-review than I am a white paper. The research we’ll be doing this semester, which will be discussed heavily in future blog posts, is very well suited for peer-review publication. Our research now will be incredibly data-based. The research we did last semester would fit amazingly as a white paper though. If it were strictly up to me, we’d be publishing our research this semester. The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research would be a great place to start with that publication. However, the deadline for Volume 10 to be released in August of this year is due in just under a month, so we may have to wait a bit longer than that to publish our research. However, if we can fit it in, it would be great to have a paper for each of the types of work we’ve done.