Senior Seminar Resources

Finding research papers

People find most of their resources from these sources, both available through Briggs Library:

  • ACM Digital Library
  • IEEE Xplore

These are large libraries of research papers, many available as full text PDFs. Many Senior Sem students do their entire projects using papers they find from these libraries.

To get to these resources:

  • You must be logged in to the university system (your email, OneStop, etc). The university provides these resources free of charge to its students and employees, upon login.
  • Go to Library page, choose Resources, and within it choose Article and Reference Databases.
  • Find “ACM Digital Library” and “IEEE Xplore” in the list.
  • Within these resources you can search by keywords, but, unless you know exactly what topic you are looking for, I would recommend first to browse recent journals and conferences (see proceedings) for areas that interest you, to get a general sense for how “well-published” a certain topic is.

Google Scholar is an excellent search tool, and can often (but by no means always) hook you up with a full text copy. It also allows you to push forward in time by clicking on the “Cited by” links. This is really valuable if you find an older article that’s really interesting, and want to find more recent articles that build on that work.

CiteSeer used to be a really useful tool, especially for pushing forward through citations. I (Nic) find it much less useful these days than Google Scholar, as Scholar seems to be a much more useful search tool. That said, CiteSeer still has an excellent cache of full text copies of papers and is valuable for that. If CiteSeer’s search tools are making you crazy, you might try using Google to search their site (add site:citeseerx.ist.psu.edu to your query).

People should feel free to help extend this. Other sources? What sources of papers worked best for you?

Meet Science: What is “peer review”?is a nice piece on what peer review is (and isn’t).

Annotated bibliography

You can keep your annotated bibliography in a Google document or a text file. Include the paper’s author(s), title, the conference or journal where it was published, a link to the full text if you have it, a short note on how it is relevant to your topic and whether you plan to use it as a primary, supplementary, or a background source.

Writing

“How to get your article rejected” by Martin Hagger is a nice article humorously outlining a number of common (but often fatal) problems in writing up research papers.

LaTeX and formatting

We use a slightly modified version of the ACM sig-alternate document class for our proceedings formatting. You can get this from Github along with example files/projects that illustrate the creation of annotated bibliographies and the creation of senior seminar papers for the proceedings. We’d recommend simply forking that project as that will give you copies of all those files, a nice version control system for managing changes to your senior seminar work, the ability to pull down changes we make to the master project, and the ability to issue pull requests on fixes or changes you make that you think would be of value to other students.

LaTeX resources:

ACM Computing Categories and General Terms

Sample beamer slides

MarthasPresentation.pdf: A presentation generated in LaTeX package beamer

MarthasPresentation.tex: The .tex source for Martha’s presentation


Edit on GitHub