CS 583: Your Individual Research Paper
due 23March2013

Our course syllabus, listed your assignments for this semester, but we have focussed mostly on learning XNA4 coding and the hardware/software needed.

It is time to address the Individual Research Paper - which will be due before Spring Break on 23 March2011. It accounts for 20% of your course grade.

Possible Topics researchtopics.txt

Please note Topics 1-23 have been evaluated as appropriate.
Topic #24. Elective topic (prior to working on a topic of your own, you must give the instructor your title, a brief description and a sample of the references you will be using. this must be acknowledged by instructor before starting.) leaves it up to you to propose your own topic to the instructor and ensure that you can find the required peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic.

Peer-Reviewed Research Articles

What are the different characterizations of printed material? Finding and Comparing Scholarly, Popular, and Trade Journal Articles [InfoDome SDSU]
You will want to use the infoguides.sdsu.edu/ that our Library pays a lot of money for. ProQuest Research Library and Academic Search Premier.

Do not forget to select:

[x] Full text documents only      
[x] Scholarly journals, including peer-reviewed 

There is an "About" tab that provides the following clarification appropriate for our class.
"Scholarly Journals, including peer-reviewed
Check this box to search only scholarly journals, including peer-reviewed journals. Leave the box empty to include other sources in your search.

A publication is considered to be scholarly if it is authored by academics for a target audience that is mainly academic, the printed format isn't usually a glossy magazine, and it is published by a recognized society with academic goals and missions.

A publication is considered to be peer reviewed if its articles go through an official editorial process that involves review and approval by the author's peers (people who are experts in the same subject area.) Most (but not all) scholarly publications are peer reviewed. Some trade publications are actually peer reviewed, but ProQuest does not consider them when filtering on peer reviewed. This is because getting results from trade publications instead of academic journals can be frustrating to researchers. Instead, ProQuest excludes these peer reviewed trade publications and only considers publications that are scholarly in terms of content, intent, and audience.

Another reference source would be the portal.acm.org/dl.cfm?coll=portal&dl=ACM ACM Digital Library. As a demonstration today, let's search for
game programming service learning
to find the article I wrote in 2009 that I shared with the class earlier. 3D game programming as service-learning for CS students.

As pointed out in lecture today, another "usually good" web resource is Google Scholar.
scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en&tab=ws

Citations - APA, MLA ....

The ACM DL lets you select export formats for all articles. For example, the paper linked above would be in the bibliography as
Kris Stewart. 2009. 3D game programming as service-learning for CS students. J. Comput. Small Coll. 24, 4 (April 2009), 246-251.
You are required to use a standard citation system in your written paper.

Bottom-Up Design for Research Paper: Conclusions first.

WayBack Machine

To support the thought that "nothing ever goes away once it is on the Internet", lets take a look at the archive for our student ACM computer club.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/acm