TDDD89 Scientific Method

Resources

• Degree projects (Master theses 30hp) at IDA (valid since 15/8/2024, new page on Liunet, requires LiU login)
• Instructions for students regarding thesis works (30hp) at IDA (PDF, requires LiU login)
• Degree projects at ISY
• exjobb.liu.se, new exjobb-project database at LiU
  
• For further currently open internal thesis projects, check also open thesis projects at IDA (forthcoming on LiUnet) as well as thesis projects announced on the personal web pages of IDA researchers and research labs/divisions, and on the ISY exjobb web page. You can also talk to the teachers in relevant advanced-level courses that you are taking.
• Template for an IDA thesis project specification
  Such a project specification (including self-assessment of project-specific prerequisites and availability of resources) is required for the IDA wexupp registration, deadline 15 working days before the beginning of the lecturing period containing the desired project start date. You can possibly reuse text from the TDDD89 ETP (UPG1) if it was for the same project.
• Template for an IDA master thesis project plan
  The (real) thesis project plan is due 2 weeks after project start. This is the generic structure for IDA, i.e., minimum requirements; your thesis examinator might have further requirements. You can possibly reuse text from the TDDD89 ETP (UPG1) if it was for the same project.
• Checklist for degree project at the second cycle (Master's) level
• J. Åberg: Introduction to scientific methods (in Swedish)
• ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (see also the PDF poster),
  
• IEEE Code of Ethics

Writing a thesis

• J. Åberg (2015). Instructions for final thesis reports.  (English, Swedish).
• C. Kessler: Stylistic advice to my students for writing a thesis
• N. Ramsey: Learning Technical Writing Using The Engineering Method, Tufts University, 2016
  
• Academic English Support at LiU (on LiUnet, requires login)
• IEEE Editorial Style Manual, official manual by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, used by engineers in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. (pdf).
• The Academic Phrasebank from Manchester University, UK, may be used to find synonyms and useful phrases in academic writing.

Reading papers

• S. Keshav (2007). How to read a paper. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3), 83-84.
• T. Greenhalgh (1997). How to read a paper. Statistics for the non-statistician. I: Different types of data need different statistical tests. British Medical Journal, 315(7104), 364. (pdf)
• T. Greenhalgh (1997). How to read a paper. Statistics for the non-statistician. II:" Significant" relations and their pitfalls. British Medical Journal, 315(7105), 422. (pdf)

References

• The reference manager Mendeley, for references in Word and LaTeX
• JabRef - Java-based BibTeX reference manager
• Reference management tools for LaTeX, inkluding a list of reference managers (Mendeley may also be used).
• Linköping University provides a special search engine for scientific publications: UniSearch. You will have to be on the LiU network or else logged in with your LiU id to use it.
• Google Scholar is a good search engine for papers pertaining to Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Plagiarism and copyright

• NoPlagiat quiz on the Lisam page of our course, see the left-menu item "Quiz".
• Definitions of copyright violations and plagiarism on the University Library pages

Awards to apply for

• List of best-thesis awards to apply for, maintained at the Computer Science department (IDA)

Literature section

Guidelines and surveys

• M. Shaw. Writing good software engineering research papers: Minitutorial. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '03, pages 726-736, Washington, DC, USA, 2003. IEEE Computer Society.

Theme-specific papers

• For those who plan to conduct studies on the effects of software systems in industrial settings:
  
• B. A. Kitchenham, S. L. Pfleeger, L. M. Pickard, and P. W. Jones. Preliminary guidelines for empirical research in software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 28(8):721-734, August 2002.
  
• P. Runeson and M. Höst. Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empirical Software Engineering, 14(2):131-164, Apr. 2009.
  
• For those who plan to study usability aspects of software systems (primarily students in themes 4, 5):
  
• D. Alonso-Ríos et al. "Usability: a critical analysis and a taxonomy." International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 26.1 (2009): 53-74.
  
• E. Hvannberg, E. Law, and M. Lérusdóttir. "Heuristic evaluation: Comparing ways of finding and reporting usability problems." Interacting with computers 19.2 (2006): 225-240.
  
• For those who plan to study software testing (primarily students in themes 3):
  
• G. Fraser and A. Arcuri. Sound empirical evidence in software testing. In Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '12, pages 178-188, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2012. IEEE Press.
  
• Arcuri, Andrea, and Lionel Briand. "A hitchhiker's guide to statistical tests for assessing randomized algorithms in software engineering." Software Testing, Verification and Reliability 24.3 (2014): 219-250.
  
• For those who plan to study Machine Learning topics:
  
• J. Vanschoren et al. "Experiment databases." Machine Learning 87.2 (2012): 127-158.
  
• R. Caruana and A. Niculescu-Mizil. "An empirical comparison of supervised learning algorithms." Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Machine learning. ACM, 2006.
  
• For those who plan to work with performance evaluation:
  
• T. Hoefler, R. Belli: Scientific benchmarking of parallel computing systems: twelve ways to tell the masses when reporting performance results. Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC'15), Nov. 2015, article no. 73, pages 1¿12.
  
• For those who plan to make use of internal code quality evaluations:
  
• R. Moser, W. Pedrycz, and G. Succi. "A comparative analysis of the efficiency of change metrics and static code attributes for defect prediction." Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software engineering (ICSE). ACM, 2008.
  
• D. Sjøberg et al. "Quantifying the effect of code smells on maintenance effort." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 39.8 (2013): 1144-1156
  

• For those who plan to do hardware related theses:
  
• I. Kuon and J. Rose. "Measuring the gap between FPGAs and ASICs." IEEE Transactions on computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems 26.2 (2007): 203-215.
  
• G. Reynoso-Meza et al. "Controller tuning by means of multi-objective optimization algorithms: A global tuning framework." IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology 21.2 (2013): 445-458.
  
• For those who plan to do security evaluation theses:
  
• Z. Wenxiu, J. Shan and Z. Chuan: "A survey of SDN data plane attacks and defense strategies." Proc. CNCIT'22, ACM, June 2023.
• H. Holm, M. Ekstedt, and D. Andersson. "Empirical analysis of system-level vulnerability metrics through actual attacks." IEEE Transactions on dependable and secure computing 9.6 (2012): 825-837.
  
• H. Shahriar and M. Zulkernine. "Mitigating program security vulnerabilities: Approaches and challenges." ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 44.3 (2012): 11.
  
• For those who plan to do theoretical theses:
  
• D. Knuth et al. "Mathematical Writing", Stanford University, 1987.
• Guidelines for Good Mathematical Writing - Francis Edward Su, Harvey Mudd College Mathematics department.
  

Student theses

See the list of topics and example theses.

Page responsible: Christoph Kessler
Last updated: 2024-12-11