Getting papers

You should be familiar with the ordinary sources of papers, all of which are available at no cost to you from on campus or by proxy or VPN.

General sources:

ACM Portal Guide (index of ACM, IEEE, and other major sources) and Digital Library (full text of every ACM paper ever)
For non-ACM papers, you may need to go to the sites listed below to get the PDF files; the links in the ACM Guide are often not to the sites for which UCI has a subscription.
Google Scholar tells you how many times a paper has been cited by others, and gives links to each citation.
CCSB (Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies) gives BibTeX entries for each paper; often has the doi or a link to a PDF.
Citeseer (Scientific Literature Digital Library) has PDFs of some hard-to-find papers, links to citations
DBLP (Digital Bibliography and Library Project) has bibliographic data, some doi's.

Sources for specific groups of papers:

CREWS Reports (Cooperative Requirements Engineering with Scenarios, a European project funded by the EU Esprit program, 1996-1999)
Elsevier
IEEE Xplore (full text of IEEE papers, back to mid-80's only)
Springer publishes a number of journals

Specific journals:

Annals of Software Engineering [Springer]
Automated Software Engineering [Springer]
IST — Information and Software Technology [Elsevier]
JSS — Journal of Systems and Software [Elsevier]
REJ — Requirements Engineering Journal [Springer]
Software [IEEE]
TOSEM — Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology [ACM]
TSE — Transactions on Software Engineering [IEEE]

Referring each other to papers

I will show you papers I think you should read. I expect you to tell me about papers you find that I should read, and to tell each other likewise. We will all benefit from this practice.

Citation tags

I refer to papers with tags consisting of:

the authors' last names , separated by '+'s. For four or more authors, I list just the first two followed by an additional '+'.
the 4-digit year of publication.
a dash and the initial letters of the first four "important words" of the title (i.e. not "a", "about", "among", "an", "and", "as", "by", "for", "from", "in", "of", "on", "or", "the", "their", "to", "with", or "without" ).

I do this because too many papers have the same author initials for the common scheme that uses tags like AA03 to keep them straight, and even using entire last names like Alspaugh+Anton2003 doesn't distinguish all the papers I use.

Example: Alspaugh+Anton2003-ucgs.

Glossary with citations

I keep an online glossary of terms, using cited quotes that give the definitions used by various authors. Make use of this, and contribute to it. If you need to know a definition, ask me for one, and if you find an interesting or useful definition in the course of your reading, show it to me so I can add it.

Thomas A. Alspaugh
Assistant Professor, Informatics Dept.
School of Information and Computer Sciences