Finding and reading papers
Understanding what others have done is critical to being able to
identify problems, improve how you solve problems, and communicate
how your solutions relate to what has been done before. Here are a
few sites that facilitate finding both published and not (yet)
published academic papers. Additionally, many researchers link to
their published papers off of their website.
- Google Scholar:
Search tailored to academic papers. To search for a particular author,
use author:"Author Name"
- arXiv (pronounced "archive"):
Many researchers post preprints (not yet published papers) here.
- CiteSeer: Another site
for searching for papers; in general, I find Google Scholar to offer
better search capabilities, but CiteSeer also caches papers, so it is
often the easiest way to find a copy of a paper.
- ACM Digital Library: Often the
official location for papers published at ACM conferences. Papers are
freely available when accessed from the campus network, but not
necessarily otherwise. Fortunately, there are usually other sites
(e.g., the authors' websites) that have free PDFs.
General advice
There are many helpful pieces of advice out there; here are a few
that ring true with me.
- Advice for
researchers and students, advice for students (and faculty)
at all stages, compiled by
Michael Ernst.
- Grad tips,
general advice for graduate students, from deciding whether or not to go
to graduate school, to where ideas come from, to defending your dissertation
and giving demos. Compiled by Saul Greenberg.
- How to do great research, a
set of blog posts about many different aspects to research, finding good
ideas, academia, and its relation to industry.
- CS graduate
study survival guide by UMD's very own Dianne O'Leary.
This covers a wide range of how to do well at grad school (esp. at UMD), but there are
also many general pieces of advice, like finding
a research topic.
Above all, though, seek advice in person: from your classmates, your
professors, your friends and family members... Be open to others'
advice, seek it out. Just remember that advice is not command:
incorporate the advice you receive into your own unique perspective,
and share it to help shape others'.
Typesetting documents