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This page is meant for my students. It enumerates several points that I noticed I repeat for many of my students as I attempt to guide them down a path of research. These are mostly simple things, obvious in retrospect, but worth paying attention to. PhD students are the primary targets of this advice, although much of it applies to MS students as well. I am of the view that research has not been conducted until it has been written up, hence the emphasis on papers in the first part of this document.

Language and Learning Online is a collection of resources to help you improve your academic performance. These resources include online tutorials, interactive exercises, and examples of Writing for Subjects.

Scientists are busy, busy people. They don't have time to spend hours on every paper they need to know about. It's essential to learn how to read a paper quickly but insightfully, because otherwise you'll become lazy and uncritical. Most papers, you'll probably read quickly as outlined below. On papers of great interest to your work, you can then drill into an in-depth review of the whole paper.

Computer researchers have a professional obligation to referee the work of others. This article tells you how to evaluate a paper and write a report using common standards and procedures

Over the last seven years, I've read perhaps four hundred papers in computer science and math. Thirty or so were well-written. These anomalies aside, extracting meaning from most of the papers was like sucking a camel through the eye of the proverbial needle upon which a thousand angels were dancing on my head, if I mix my metaphors right.

LaTeX is a wonderful system for text processing. However, in reviewing and reading many papers, I often see the same errors, over and over again. Especially for my students ... please don't ever give me your paper to read that has any of these errors.

Having just finished another pile of conference-paper reviews, it strikes me that the single most common stylistic problem with papers in our field is the abstract. Disappointingly few Computer Science authors seem to understand the difference between an abstract and an introduction.

Once you have joined the academic path of life by passing your finals in kindergarten, you are on the road to becoming a researcher. Follow these handy hints to help you on your way.