Resources for technical writing and research ethics

Thanks to Michael Fuller for providing many of these pointers.

Searching for research on the web

With thanks to Tim Arnold-Moore, Vic Cieselski, and Michael Fuller, who undertook the bulk of the work of identifying the sites listed below.

This page lists resources and tips for finding current computer science research on the web. Some general tips:

  • Use general-purpose search engines and special-purpose repositories to search for titles and abstracts of likely papers.
  • Identify authors who publish in reputable journals and conferences, then look for their home pages. Their technical reports may also be worth reading, and more likely to be available in full than are published (and copyright) papers. Some technical reports will be preliminary versions of published papers.
  • Given citation details for likely papers, it is usually straightforward to find the papers in either an online repository (such as the ACM digital library) or your local university libraries, via their online search facilities. Many journals have their own home page.
  • Don't expect refereed papers to be available online. Some are, some aren't.
  • Make extensive use of Citeseer to get from one paper to another. Check the official version of papers, not just the version (often a preprint) indexed by Citeseer.
  • Check the currency of online resources and consider their quality. Try and identify whether the authors are well-known in the field.
  • Try to locate authorative reference sites for the field you are interested in. For many areas, individuals maintain pages of pointers and references that are themselves valuable resources; if these are any good, other people working in the area will have pointers to these pages.
  • Many of the ACM and IEEE special-interest groups maintain pages of pointers to other resources.

The "Information skills" pages at RMIT library have pointers to online guides to information search, and criteria for evaluating the worth of papers discovered online.

Special purpose repositories:

Other useful sites:

Feedback and suggestions for additions invited.

Bad science and pseudoscience

There's a lot of pseudoscience out there. Fortunately, there are a lot of websites debunking it ...

First, there are the associations of skeptics: the CSICOP Committee for Scientific Claims of the Paranormal and its journal, Skeptical Inquirer; the Australian Skeptics; and the UK Skeptics.

Many individual's have great pages of links, including Bill Beaty's Weird Science, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, Cliff Harris's pseudoscience links, and Donald Simanek's skeptical page.

Other pages of links include these at the Physics department of University of Wisconsin-Stout, these these at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and these at Softpanorama.

And some things are just plain silly. See the absurd patents, the Mass media at work, and the Annals of Improbable Research.

Many years ago I picked up a bound edition of the Gentleman's magazine for 1763 (complete with a farmer's accounts scribbled on the flyleaf). Richard Blackwell's pumping engine is reproduced from the magazine - original image, freshly typeset text.

Also of interest are two apocrypha that have running around on the net for years, on scientific communication and proof techniques. (Does anyone know where these originated?) Look at this advice on how to have your abstract rejected.

The SCI may not be pseudoscience - it is just a conference organizing body - but I am far from convinced that it is good for science. See my discussion of their aims and refereeing procedures.

There is a lot to digest at Marie desJardins's collection of funny stuff.