Useful resources for researchers
Most of this is repeated elsewhere and much is out of date. But at one point, this was a useful list of things that people might want to know. Now that I don’t do as much networking I really need to update this with some things that networking/tech/law students need to know!
Applying/Starting out
- Choosing Graduate School in Computer Science
- How to Succeed in Graduate School
- Useful Things to Know About Ph.D. Thesis Research (H. T. Kung)
- Jon Crowcroft’s tips on applying to Cambridge
- Hamming on research
- Keshav’s Hints on doing research
- Systems Software Research is Irrelevant
- How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia
- Rapaport’s How to Study
- The Researcher’s Bible
- Why do a PhD?
- Ten Questions To Ask Prospective Graduate Students
- Saleem Bhatti’s list of links
- Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students
Reading
- How to read a paper by Keshav
- Dave Kotz’s favourite papers
- 25th anniversary edition of CCR
- Jon Crowcroft’s typically tangential reading list
- CCR has an occasional “recommended reading” column: Jim Kurose, Jon Crowcroft, David Wetherall, Matthias Grossglauser, Mostafa Ammar, Craig Partridge, Venkata Padmanabhan
- Matt Might’s reading for graduate students
- CS is inherently multidisciplinary. So take a look at the “Learning other fields” section of How to do Research At the MIT AI Lab” (AI-specific, but the principles apply to any area of CS).
- The Task of the Referee
- Papers: ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar (but be careful interpreting results), IEEE Xplore, CiteSeer, DBLP, SSRN
- Practical reading: Linux Documentation Project, ACM Professional Development, How NOT to go about a programming assignment
Writing
- If you are one of my students, start with my own tips as they may help you understand some of my feedback
- Advice on Research and Writing from CMU
- Dave Kotz’s writing guidelines
- Some advice on PhD thesis structure from the department where I did my PhD
- How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper
- Simon Peyton Jones on how to give a talk and write papers and proposals
- Good Writing by Marc H. Raibert
- How to write an abstract (Simon Dobson)
- Phinished - “A discussion and support group for people trying to finish their dissertations or theses, and those who have been there”
- Writing For Research (Patrick Dunleavy)
- Strunk’s Elements of Style (but be careful following their advice)
- Lynch’s Guide to Grammar and Style
- Orwell on Politics and the English Language
- The Hemingway web app “makes your writing bold and clear”
- Other style-checking tools include diction, the Writer’s Workbench, Matt Might’s 3 shell scripts to improve your writing, and Neil Spring’s style-check.rb
- The Economist Style Guide has some good (and amusing) tips
- Writing a good introduction (Jim Kurose)
- Structuring and writing academic papers (Writing for Research)
- Catchy Titles Are Good: But Avoid Being Cute (Jacob Wobbrock)
- PhD skills from Toby Walsh (writing papers/grants/reviews, running experiments, etc.)
- A long list of posts on writing a literature review from Raul Pacheco-Vega
- Other tips on writing a literature review from Toronto and Trondheim
- Writing a good grant proposal
- Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
- How to write good (!)
- 50 Writing Tools: Quick List
- Matt Might’s guide to peer review
- The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e and An essential guide to LaTeX2e usage
- Always useful for meeting those pesky page limits: Squeezing Space in LaTeX
- The devil’s guide to citing the literature (D. J. Bernstein)
- Statistics Done Wrong
- How to design an award-winning conference poster