CS620: Topics in Programming Languages
Reading Papers and Writing Paper Reviews
Tia Newhall provides a very brief set of tips for reading research papers.
Start keeping track of all the papers you have read in a bibtex format. You can store your notes about the paper in a field called Annote. If you have a mac, there is an awesome utility that helps you do this called BibDesk. JabRef and Mendeley are also quite useful.
I recommend that you write your reviews in latex. Your final report will need to be in a format that is easiest to do with latex. See an example latex file to get started. Additionally, below the latex source is provided for an example review.Review Requirements These requirements are also listed in the syllabus.
Each review should be one to two pages and cover the following questions about the paper:
- What problem did the paper address? Who is the audience?
- Is it important/interesting? What was the context for the paper? Why should the audience care?
- What is the approach used to solve the problem?
- How does the paper support or otherwise justify the conclusions it reaches?
- What problems are explicitly or implicitly left as future research questions?
- How does the paper address the questions we are asking about programming models this semester?
Example Review
Here is an example review for the LamWolf91 paper that we read in CS553 last semester (pdf, tex, bib).The detail in the example review is the amount of detail you will need in your review for the paper you present in class. For your submitted paper reviews, use the same format, but you only need to do ONE of the following:
- place this paper in context of papers we haven't already read in class by actually skimming some of those papers. (In the example, the second paragraph for the second question).
- provide an example to illustrate the approach
- generate a number of future research questions that were not specified explicitly in the paper.