Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
is rarely a need to understand every line. The number of papers that a researcher
working on a particular project has to know well is usually small, even though the
number the researcher should have read to establish their relevance is large.
Thus it is important to become an effective reader, by giving each paper neither
more nor less time that it deserves. The first time you read a paper, skim through it to
identify the extent to which it is relevant—only read it thoroughly if there is likely to
be value in doing so. Make the effort to properly understand the details, but always
beware of details that may be wrong, or garbled.
Expect to have a range of modes of reading: browsing to find papers and get
an overview of activity and to understand the main outcomes in a body of work;
background reading of texts and popular science magazines; and thorough, focused
reading of key or complex papers that stretch your abilities or the limits of your
understanding. But don't allow reading to develop into a form of procrastination—it
needs to be part of a productive cycle of work, not a dominant use of time.
Finding Research Papers
Each research project builds on a body of prior work. Doing and describing research
requires a thorough knowledge of the work of others. However, the number of papers
published in major computer science venues each year is at least tens of thousands,
a volume that prohibits reading or understanding more than a fraction of the papers
appearing in any one field.
A consolation is that, in an active field, other researchers have to a certain extent
already explored and digested the older literature. Their work provides a guide to
earlier research—as will your work, once it is published—and thus a complete explo-
ration of the archives is rarely necessary. However, this is onemore reason to carefully
search for current work. And beware: reading about a paper that seems relevant is
never a substitute for reading the paper itself. If you need to discuss or cite a paper,
read it first.
Comprehensive exploration of relevant literature involves following several inter-
twined paths:
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Use obvious search terms to explore theWeb. You are likely to find, not just papers,
but also home pages for projects and teams concerned with the same research area.
You are also likely to find documents that suggest further valuable search terms.
Be exploratory in your search; sometimes the research in an area is divided across
separate communities that have different vocabularies.
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Some of the major search engines have search tools that are specifically for acad-
emic papers. These may index by individual, by institution, and by citation. They
are today the single most effective method for finding relevant work.
￿
Visit the websites of research groups and researchers working in the area. These
sites should give several kinds of links into the wider literature: the names of
researchers whose work you should investigate, the names of their co-authors,
 
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