Table of Contents
The CS Research Starter Handbook¶
A Builder’s Guide to Mastering Academic Research (Master’s Level)¶
Contents¶
📖 Preface¶
Part I – From Confusion to Clarity: Choosing Your Research Direction¶
Chapter 1: The Chaos Before the Focus
1.1 My journey: CV to NLP to Public Service AI
1.2 When is it okay to pivot topics?
1.3 Finding your “why” and narrowing down your “what”
Chapter 2: Types of CS Research Topics
2.1 System design vs. theoretical vs. empirical
2.2 Applied vs. fundamental vs. exploratory
2.3 Social good and interdisciplinary CS research
Chapter 3: How to Settle on a Thesis Topic
3.1 Feasibility: time, cost, hardware
3.2 Relevance: impact to field or country
3.3 Your personal growth and career alignment
Part II – Mapping the Research Landscape¶
Chapter 4: Types of Academic Publications
4.1 Journals vs. Conferences
4.2 Workshops, arXiv, Magazines
4.3 Peer-reviewed vs. preprint
Chapter 5: Major Publishers & Platforms
5.1 ACM, IEEE
5.2 Springer, Elsevier, Open Access
5.3 Google Scholar, DBLP, Semantic Scholar
Chapter 6: What Makes a Good Research Venue?
6.1 Journal vs. conference decision-making
6.2 Venue ranking (CORE, h5-index, impact factor)
6.3 Tips for beginners: start small, think forward
Part III – Finding, Reading, and Tracking Research¶
Chapter 7: Where to Find the Literature
7.1 Search engines vs. academic libraries
7.2 ACM DL, IEEE Xplore, DBLP
7.3 ResearchGate, Connected Papers, Litmaps
Chapter 8: How to Read a Research Paper
8.1 Skim → Deep Dive → Synthesize
8.2 Note-taking styles (review templates)
8.3 How to avoid “PDF hoarding” and burnout
Chapter 9: Organizing Your Research
9.1 Zotero, Obsidian, Notion, OneNote
9.2 Tags, themes, visual maps
9.3 Building a literature matrix (for Related Work)
Part IV – Academic Integrity & Writing With Impact¶
Chapter 10: Academic Integrity 101
10.1 Self-plagiarism, double submissions
10.2 Paraphrasing vs. quoting
10.3 Publisher policies (ACM, IEEE)
Chapter 11: Citing and Referencing
11.1 Zotero, Mendeley, BibTeX
11.2 IEEE, APA, ACM citation formats
11.3 Tools to auto-generate your .bib files
Chapter 12: Writing the Related Work Section
12.1 From notes to narrative
12.2 Thematic vs. chronological structure
12.3 How many citations is “enough”?
Part V – Writing, Submitting, and Publishing¶
Chapter 13: Writing Your First Research Paper
13.1 IMRaD structure
13.2 Abstract, intro, methods, conclusion
13.3 Common formatting: IEEE, ACM templates
Chapter 14: Understanding the Peer Review Process
14.1 Submission portals (EasyChair, PCS)
14.2 Blind review, comments, rebuttals
14.3 How to revise based on feedback
Chapter 15: From Draft to Submission
15.1 Internal deadlines and advisor reviews
15.2 Ethical authorship and contributor roles
15.3 What to expect after hitting “Submit”
Appendices & Templates¶
A. Sample annotated paper
B. Literature matrix template
C. Review sheet & note-taking template
D. Top venues by domain (CV, NLP, HCI, SE)
E. Citation examples (IEEE/ACM)
F. Tools for collaboration (Overleaf, Git, HackMD)