THE LITERATURE: WHAT AND HOW?

• Be part of a research group.
• Surf the web.
• Read.
• Download and try stuff.
• Make presentations.
• Contact authors.
• Take notes!

What to read

• What someone at VT tells you to read.
• What someone at VT wrote.
• Frequent or significant references in what you read.
• Graze the best journals.
• Classic papers vs. the latest-and-greatest.
• A quick tour of the publishing landscape:
  • Journals
  • Conference proceedings
  • Books: textbooks, monographs, collected papers.
  • Technical reports, preprints, drafts.
  • The web.

How to read

• Don't panic.
• Skim first. You shouldn't read everything. Try to screen for redundancy and irrelevance.
• Keep an annotated bibliography.
• Categorize. Group by sub-topic, approach, author(s). Relate to other things you've read.
• Make special note of the very best ones -- ``I want to write like that.''