Comments and suggestion

Note: I may try to use this document to assemble suggestions for future reports.

References

Note that most conferences (of both good and bad quality) in computer science provide printed proceedings (often with ISBN and/or ISSN numbers). For these papers you should typically provide: the name of the authors, the title of the paper, the name of the conference, the location of the conference, the month and year of the conference, as well as the page numbers within the proceedings. Some example references to such papers can look as follow: Similarly, most journals are printed (both of good and bad quality). For these papers you should typically provide: the name of the authors, the title of the paper, the name of the journal, the volume of the journal, the issue of the journal, the month and year of the issue was published, as well as the page numbers within the volume/issue. Some example references to such papers can look as follow: RFCs typically have authors which need to be mentioned in your references. (These are sometimes the inventors of the protocols and/or people that in other ways have had great impact on the design of the protocols. An RFC reference could looks as follows: Note: One approach to find where a paper (in computer science) was published is to use google. Simply take the exact title of the paper in a google search. In addition to multiple copies of the paper, you will likely find that most researchers make a list of their papers available on their Websites. For example, a list of my own papers can be found here. On these sites you can typically find the conference/journal information that you are looking for. (Can also be good to check the website of the conference/journal or the ACM or IEEE digital libraries, for example, as some authors sometimes do not have completely accurate information on their webpages.)

Referencing

You may also want to have a look at how these papers typically do referencing. For example, consider the related work section in the above paper that introduced chord. For those that tried to use a referencing style that uses author names and years for references (rather than reference numbering), you may want to have a quick look at the related work section in a paper that use such referencing (e.g., the following). Note that you typically have two ways of writing such references: (i) It can be shown that X positively impact Y [Author et al. 2020], or (ii) Author et al. [2020] show that X positively impact Y.

Note that you should have all author names in your reference list. (Please do not use at al. in the reference list.) However, you should use et al. (within the text) whenever you reference a paper with three or more authors. (If there are only two authors you should mention the last name of the two authors.)

What (not) to reference?

Please avoid using webpages (including Wikipedia pages) for referencing. For most things there are much more reliable information sources. Instead try to use books, peer-reviewed journals, peer-reviewed conference proceedings, and RFCs. (As a side note I did find that many groups relied on RFCs for topics do not really have any applicable RFCs.) Also, note that people reading your paper/report in the future would be able to easily access these (published) sources, whereas this is not the case for information from websites.

Try to determine the credibility of a source, and then pick credible sources for your references. For example, a highly regarded journal or conference written by an expert in the field is likely to be more credible than a term paper ("exjobb", for example).

While identifying credible sources in an area where one have limited knowledge may be a non-trivial task (that I understand comes with practice), one approach is to ask experts what they consider the most reliable venues and the strongest researchers in a particular the field. By starting with credible sources, you can often gain a better understanding for what they refer to (which provide suggestions to other potential credible sources). While this may only provide an initial glance into a new area, one approach. (For initial references you can refer to the references in the textbook and/or ask me for suggestions.)

True and clear text

Please make sure that what you write is true. Also try to explain things as clearly as possible. I have found that some text have been written based on what you may believe is true, rather than things you know is true. This have resulted in many text snippets which are not sound and that contains faulty statements, descriptions and/or explanations. This is not acceptable. Please make sure that you do your best trying to understand the things you write about before you submit the text.

You should also try to remove any typos and grammatical errors. These can easily distract the reader from the points you are trying to make. Try to help each other improve your language skills. (Remember that most employers value these skills very highly!)

More to come ...

Well, likely ...