Engr 694-60: Research Methods in Computer Science
Spring 2014

Assignment #6: Annotated Bibliography
Due Date: Tuesday, 15 April 2014 at 11:59 P.M.

For this assignment, you are required to produce an annotated bibliography by completing the following tasks:

• Choose a computer science topic you wish to investigate. Ideally, this should be in an area that you are considering for a possible dissertation, thesis, or other research project. If you choose the same topic for this assignment and the final project, you can leverage the work from the annotated bibliography for the project.


• Create an annotated bibliography containing at least 10 references related to your chosen topic. Your bibliography should include both seminal sources and at least one recent reference (with a 2010 or later publication date).


• Clarification added after semester: Most, if not all, of your references, should be scholarly papers of reasonable length published in reputable computer science journals or refereed conference proceedings (or post-proceedings). The journals, transactions, and conference proceedings published by ACM and IEEE are good sources for papers. But you may choose other reputable publishers of scholarly papers with significant computer science content.


• Write a short (e.g., 3-5 sentence) description of each reference, giving its focus and major contribution. Write in complete sentences and use correct English with good style (as we have discussed in this course). Include a complete citation for each reference. Also tell the reader what kind of reference it is, and explain how the references relate to each other. See the Lecture Notes for information about writing annotations. The Notes also link to example annotated bibliographies.


• Clarification added after semester: An annotation must be your own work, not text copied from the paper or from a review of the paper.


• Write a brief introduction to your bibliography to define the topic and scope of your bibliography.


• Use the IEEE transactions style for your citations. Your bibliography may include references that are not explicitly cited in your introductory text. (Do not use the IEEE transactions template for your document. The document should be single column.)


• Use LaTeX with the builtin article class to format the overall document. Use BibTeX style file IEEEannot.bst style file to format the citations and annotated bibliography list.


• Submit both the LaTeX and BibTeX source files and a PDF of your bibliography electronically via Blackboard by the due date. Turn in a paper copy of the bibliography to Dr. Cunningham in class or in his mailbox. (This can be done at the next class after the due date.)

Here is an example of a reference together with its short annotation:

[1] L. Lamport, L^AT_EX: A Document Preparation System. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1986.

L^AT_EX is a document preparation system widely used in mathematics and computer science.  It was implemented by Lamport on top of Donald Knuth's T_EX.  This book is the original reference manual. It has largely been superseded, but it does provide a fascinating peek into the past.

Acknowledgement: This assignment is adapted from Andrew Black's Project 1 for his Scholarly Skills course at Portland State University.

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