Finding and reading papers
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📄 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.
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- 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
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☝️ There are many helpful pieces of advice out there; here are a few that ring true with us. 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'.
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- 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.
Typesetting documents
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📝 Most researchers write their papers using LaTeX. Getting to know this tool will make it easier to jump right into working with a research group. Here are some resources to help you learn and master LaTeX.
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