The caffeinated engineer
How to search for good references for a State of the Art
How to search for good references
For those who are doing the state of art in dissertation preparation courses (PDIS at MIEIC), I advise you to use the CORE2018 Ranking to find the best conferences in your area (order by ranking, the best are A *, then A, B, etc.). Afterwards, look at the ACM Digital Library or IEEE Xplore or just Google Scholar if all else fails!
We will follow a future Informatics Engineer, who wants to do good research for the state of the art of the dissertation.
(S)He is interested in reading the latest publications related to continuous integration, a topic within Software Engineering. Being a smart but very busy engineering student, (s)he wants to read the best ones first…
The Scimago Journal Ranking
There is a universally recognized ranking for Journals, called Scimago JR. In this ranking, the journals are divided in quartiles, Q1 being the best journals and Q4 the worst. If you search for your research area here you will discover the best journals.
About journals
Journal articles are usually much longer than a conference article and the review process is much longer and harder to go through. Often more than one review stage is present, with reviewers asking authors to improve a lot of stuff, often to the point of a rewrite.
However, because of this tough competition and review process, a journal article is often a very high quality publication, where the entire research process is explained in detail, whereas in a conference you may be left with more questions after reading a paper. Often there is not enough room in a conference paper to write everything in detail and also provide a comprehensive state of the art.
For those researchers who don’t like to travel to conferences, publishing in journals can be an alternative; just remember that a researcher without a network of contacts can be left out of some interesting opportunities for collaboration—like in everything in life.
The CORE2018 Conference Ranking
A good first step is to go to the CORE2018 conference ranking and search for “Software Engineering”. Then, sort the results by Ranking to see the A* conferences of Software Engineering at CORE2018. The best ones are A*, followed by A, then B, etc.
Here is the result.
IEEE Xplore
The best conferences are usually either IEEE or ACM, so it goes to IEEE Xplore and looks for the title and acronym of the conference “(International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)” in this case.) Copy-Paste in the IEEE Xplore and….
Here is the result.
In the case of IEEE Xplore, all papers should appear, but below the title appears the conference where the article was published.
By clicking on the link with the name of the conference, it is possible to get the compete list of its papers.
ACM Digital Library
If one cannot find anything in IEEE Xplore, the next option is the ACM Digital Library. In this case, since ICSE is a top conference, it will also be there.
Clicking on the “Table of Contents” gives one access to the list of papers:
Because one sometimes needs to download the papers in PDF format, one should do this research inside the FEUP network, otherwise… no PDFs for anyone.
Google Scholar
Well, this needs no explanation.
And where do I publish my own paper?
Of course every Masters student should try to publish a research paper to get an excellent grade. But where?
After knowing which are the best conferences in the dissertation topic, a student can look for the upcoming Calls For Papers, for example at WikiCFP (they will be shown by categories).
The search function is somewhat hidden, so here it is:
Good research!