Some TMA questions ask you to find an academic article, and say something about it. This blog post offers some concise tips about where to start, and what to look for. The reason for these questions is simple: it allows you to demonstrate your ability to find interesting and relevant resources, and to identify key points from those resources.
Starting point
The starting point is, of course, the university library service. The library resource is extensive. A part of everyone’s students fees goes towards supporting it. A part of becoming aware of how your discipline works is about knowing what the main sources of information are.
A really good starting point is the subject collection index. You can start to explore this by going to the ‘by subject’ link from the main library page. From here, there is a subject heading of ‘computing’.
Clicking through to computing, highlights some important collections. Two that are really important are the:
Searching
Filters are your friend. Whatever search terms you enter into the search tool for a digital collection, you’re going to get loads of results back. If you are asked for articles (or papers) in the TMA question, then make sure that you specify this is what you want.
If you are looking for a specific article “put search terms in quotes”, which asks a search engine to search for that entire phrase. If you are looking for words in a title of an article, consider digging into some of the other search options. You can tell a library search service to just look at the title, rather than the abstract, or the text of an article.
A practical recommendation is: don’t ask a generative AI tool for references. I say this for two reasons: the first is that these kind of questions are not about your use of Generative AI; they are about using a library catalogue. Secondly, Gen AI ‘tools’ can easily make things up. Since they can easily waste your study time, my recommendation is to avoid using them entirely for searching tasks.
Quick tips
The abstract is also your friend. Even if a title looks related to what you are searching for, the article might be about something different. Before downloading an article, quickly read the abstract of an article if one is available. An abstract is intended to summarise everything in one place and is intended for the busy reader. It will summarise the aim of an article, what methods it used, what the findings were, and what it concludes.
If the abstract suggests the paper might be useful to you, download it. If you choose to save a copy of it, give the file where you save it a sensible name. Often online journal catalogues suggest file names that are not very helpful when you come back to look at the article.
When you have a copy of the article, look at the concluding section. What does it say? Does it offer something useful?
More detailed guidance
I was recently told about the following article:
Keshav, S. (2007) ‘How to read a paper’, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3), Available at: http://doi.org/10.1145/1273445.1273458
Increasingly, articles have something called a Digital Object Identifier, or DOI. This is a way to provide a persistent reference to an article. Placing ‘doi.org’ in front of a DOI allows it to be related to a particular digital library.
Rather than going directly to the library through the persistent link, you will probably have to login to the university library, and find it from there. I used a search of ‘“how to read a paper” ACM SIGCOMM’ to access a page that summarised where the article was published, and then accessed it through a ‘download PDF’ link.
To really understand what an article says, Keshav suggests that a ‘three-pass approach’ to reading might be useful. Whether you choose to do this very much depends on why you are reading. The first pass is all about ‘getting a general idea’ of a paper. Two of the key tips that I’ve mentioned in the earlier section are mentioned in this first pass. If you need summarise the aim or purpose of an article, you will, of course, need to apply the other levels.
Alternative guidance is available within the academic skills part of the study skills help pages. A useful resource is the section that describe critical reading techniques. This resource is quite general, and is intended for all modules and all students, but it is certainly worth a quick look.
Referencing
Referencing is important and necessary, but is very tedious.
The ‘go to’ source for advice about referencing is the CiteThemRight website. The OU requires all students to the Harvard referencing style, which differs from, say, the IEEE style of referencing.
To access the CiteThemRight guidance, you need to login via something called Athens. Just enter the name of the university, and you should be able to login via your OUCU.
If you have a moment, do look at how you cite academic articles. Pay particular attention to what bits of a reference is put in quotes, and what bit is put in italics. Like I said, referencing is tedious, but it is a necessary evil.
Final points
There is an important difference between formal and informal articles. A TMA question is usually asking for references to formal academic articles rather than informal articles, such as blog posts, or news items.
In some cases, blog articles contain a lot of useful technical information. Notable software engineers have sometimes used blog posts to disseminate descriptions about software engineering practices. Whilst arguably helpful, this doesn’t often directly relate to an implicit aim of the question, which is to gain exposure to how software engineering research is discussed and shared in an academic way, by an academic community.
Reflections
Searching and evaluating information is an important graduate skill, and one that is especially important in software development and engineering. Tools and practices can and do change. During their career, a software engineer will spend a lot of time reading, and figuring things out.
This short post aimed to share some useful hints and tips. For TMA questions where you’re asked to find articles and paper, my main one is: keep it academic.
Do feel free to refer to other posts that relate to TM354 Software Engineering.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements are duly given the the TM113 module team for alerting me to the article that is mentioned in this post.