A survey paper provides research background and analysis of a focused area of research. For those doing a senior project or thesis, the survey paper will be related to the topic of their project. For everyone else, the high-level topic(s) will be defined by Professor Papoutsaki.
You will complete your survey paper in a number of steps:
- Paper topic + 10 references: Identify the topic of your survey paper and at least 10 papers related to the topic. Half of the work will be finding the papers and half will be narrowing down and define the topic. Even for those who aren't doing a senior project, you will still need to identify a subfield of the high-level topic(s) defined by the instructor.
Your submission should include a few sentences describing your topic of interest and ten properly formatted citations. A citation should be of the form seen on the course web page, i.e.
[author(s)]. [year]. [title]. [where_it_was_published].
and should be listed in alphabetical order by the last name of the first author.
- Annotated bibliography: Read your initial 10 papers and others you discover along the way. For each paper you read, write a paragraph or two summarizing the paper. This will become your annotated bibliography. You may use whatever formatting you'd like, but make sure you include a full, proper citation to the paper along with the summary. I recommend looking into the ACM starter.
- Outline + introduction: A critical part of a good survey paper is that the author should provide some good analysis and organization of the subfield that the paper discusses. A survey paper is not simply a paragraph by paragraph summary of papers. Your outline should consist of the section and subsections that you plan to have for the paper. Use descriptive section names for these headings.
You should also include the text for your introductory section. It should give a very high-level overview of the paper topic and also outline how you have organized your paper. You do not need a bibliography, though you should include preliminary citations already where appropriate.
- Draft: The survey paper should be at least 6 pages and at most 10 pages long and should cite at least 10 papers, though it's likely that you will cite more. You must also include at least one figure or table that you generated (though more might also be helpful). The draft should be a complete draft, i.e. should have all of the sections filled in, though it may be a little rough and some of the sections might still be missing a paragraph or two. We will use the official ACM template (see the starter).
- Final paper: The final version of the paper should be properly formatted, meet all the requirements outlined in the draft (length, number of citations, table/figure), be free of any grammar or spelling issues, be well organized, and should include changes made to address the review feedback.
Students working on a group senior project should talk with their senior project advisor and 190 instructor since the requirements will vary slightly.
All work should be submitted via Sakai assignments.