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Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

The guidelines were developed by Professor Saiedian in mid 2000's for his software engineering (SE) students. Any EECS student may use these guidelines for other classes by ignoring SE-specific requirements. A PDF version of these guidelines is available.

Preparing weekely paper reviews

Students who choose to do weekly paper reviews as their special research project should follow the following minimal requirements. Additional requirements will be provided depending on the course where such reviews will be an option:

1. Submit the list of at least 10 papers related to the course topic that you would like to review by the third week of the semester. The list should be formatted using one of the well-known bibliographic styles (e.g, the APA or the Harvard, or the IEEE Transactions). You may consider consulting my guidelines for writing a term paper for more information.

2. The primarily source of reading should be peer-reviewed papers for the course you are enrolled in (see the course syllabus for that course). For introductory courses, articles primarily from the following lesser technical journals should be selected: Communications of the ACM, IEEE Computer, IEEE Software (see the course syllabus for the course you are registered in). For non-introductory, for example for software engineering courses, choose articles from the transactions, e.g., for software engineering, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.

3. The selected papers should be peer-reviewed research work. Commentaries and anecdotal experience reports without actual experiments or empirical studies will not be approved.

4. The chosen papers should be minimally seven pages. Strive for papers that have been published during the past four years.
   Formatting references. The reference listing should be as complete as possible. It is very likely that your references will include journal articles, conference proceedings articles, books (or chapters in a book or in a collection), and technical reports. The following is a list of required items for each of such article:

   • Journal articles: author, title, journal, volume, number, year, pages [month].
   • Books: author (or editor), title, publisher, year, edition, publisher address.
   • Book chapters: same as book and/or conference proceedings articles.
   • Conference proceedings: author, title, proceedings title, pages, year, publisher, [editor, month, place]
   • Technical reports: author, title, institution, year [number, address]
   • Thesis/dissertation: author, title, school, year, [address]

   When submitting the list of papers for approval, use a well-known bibliography style, e.g., the APA or Harvard style. For each paper, you should minimally provide the following: all authors, paper title, journal title, volume, number, pages, year, publisher.

5. Your reviews should be at least two pages (singlespace). Your review should be a true review, evaluation, and takeaways of the work. Avoid paragraph by paragraph summaries. Your first paragraph should be a summary of the entire article (the authors, motivation, methodology, validation approach, and contributions and results.

6. Paper reviews should be provided in printed format at the beginning of each class session. For each review, provide the following:

   Your full name
   Course title
   Review # and date
   Full citation of the paper being reviewed
   

   Follow the above with your written review. At the end, it is OK to include one or two additional references (in ABA or Harvard bibliography style) that you may have cited in your review.

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