CSCI 450 - Artifical Intelligence: Home

Regardless of where you are getting your information, you need to be aware of a few simple attributes about whatever information you are using.

When evaluating information, here are five helpful considerations:

Currency: timeliness of the information.

Relevance: importance of the information for your need.

Authority: source of the information.

Accuracy: reliability, truthfulness, correctness.

Purpose: reason that the information exists.

The terms Academic, Scholarly or Peer Reviewed are frequently used interchangably.  In nearly all cases they mean the same thing.  They are used to indicated a scholarly (adheres to a common 4-6 part format to report research findings) article that has been peer reviewed (by others with knowledge of research in the field) that appears in an academic or research publication (few or no advertisements).

Characteristics of a Scholarly Resource:

1. Peer Reviewed (ususally blind review)
Peer review means a group of experts in the field review the article that an author has submitted to a scholarly journal for publication BEFORE it is actually published. These are typically peers of the submitting author (thus "peer reviewed") working in the same field. There are typically 2-4 reviewers who will make suggestions to improve the article, identify particular strong or weak points in the sections of the article, and generally provide feedback to the author (through the journal editor, thus "blind peer reviewed") about the value of the findings and if the article should be accepted for publication.
2. Writing can be complex and difficult for readers without knowledge of the field.
Making sense of research findings in a particular field requires some knowledge of that field. Articles published to share research findings really are intended for an academic or research audience where knowledge of the field at a certain level is assumed. The narrorwer the intended reading audience, the more knowledge the reader is assumed to have.
3. The article follows a typical formula.
1. Abstract 
2. Methods
3. Results
4. Discussion
5. Conclusion
6. References
4. In-text citations or footnotes or endnotes are frequently utilized.
Depending on the field, some scholarly publications will use "in line" citations (Author Name, Year), some will use an elevated citation number that references a citation or note that appears at the bottom of the page called a footnote (at the "foot" or bottom of the page), while others will use an elevated citation number to an article or note that appears at the end of the article itself called an endnote.
5. Reference list typically appears at the end of the article (or book).
Not only is there a reference list / bibliography, but that list will be formatted in a particular style (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) that is common to a particular field of research.
6. The publication in which the article appears has no (or very little) advertising.

Getting a basic overview on a particular topic is a great first step in learning about the major issues, trends, sub-disciplines, standard works or ongoing research efforts in the field.

Pre-prints are the latest "pre-published" research findings in many science related fields.   Many pre-prints eventually find there way into the formal scholarly journal literature several months to a year (or two) later after they have been further refined and editorially polished.

Selected examples, for more examples, see the ACM Journals Word Style Guide.

For a paginated article in a journal:

Patricia S. Abril and Robert Plant. 2007. The patent holder\u2019s dilemma: Buy, sell, or troll? Commun. ACM 50, 1 (Jan. 2007), 36-44. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1188913.1188915

For an enumerated article in a journal:

Sarah Cohen, Werner Nutt, and Yehoshua Sagic. 2007. Deciding equivalances among conjunctive aggregate queries. J. ACM 54, 2, Article 5 (April 2007), 50 pages. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1219092.1219093

For a monograph (whole book):

David Kosiur. 2001. Understanding Policy-Based Networking (2nd. ed.). Wiley, New York, NY.

For a multi-volume work (as a book):

Donald E. Knuth. 1997. The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd. ed.). Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc.

For a (paginated proceedings) article in a conference proceedings (conference, symposium or workshop):

Sten Andler. 1979. Predicate Path expressions. In Proceedings of the 6th. ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL \u201979). ACM Press, New York, NY, 226-236. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/567752.567774

For a technical report:

Greg Turk and David Banks. 1996. Image-guided streamline placement. Technical Report I-CA2200. University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. 453-460 pages. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/237170.237285

For an online document/WWW resource:

Harry Thornburg. 2001. Introduction to Bayesian Statistics. (March 2001). Retrieved March 2, 2005 from http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/bayes/bayes.html