This page is designed to give, mainly PhD students, advice and guidelines about carrying out research within ASAP.
1. General Comments
1.1 Introduction
As the size of ASAP has grown it was felt sensible to offer some advice to PhD students (and others) about carrying out research within ASAP1.2 Queries
If you have any queries, the first person you should seek advice from is your supervisor, who will ultimately sign your expenses.1.3 Keep Me Informed
If there is anything that is not covered on these pages, please let me know. I'll do my best to update them.
2. Conferences
2.1 What Conferences Can I Attend?
As a general rule you can only attend a conference if you have submitted, and had accepted, a paper to that conference. The conferences you submit to are a matter of discussion between you and your supervisor. However, the over riding aspect is the quality of the conference. ASAP aim to publish in the best quality conferences and journals. With regard to conferences this means an international programme committee and the proceedings published by a recognised publisher. However these are not the only criteria and it is only your supervisor who can ultimately decide. As an example, there might be a top quality conference but if it is not in our area (even though your paper addresses that area) it might not be worth submitting as you won't get anything from the conference, as a large part of conference attendance is to meet like minded people.2.2 How Many Conferences Can I Attend?
This largely depends on your PhD and the discussions you have with your supervisor. However, within ASAP, a general rule is that a PhD consists of 3 conference papers and 3 journal papers. Please bear in mind this is only a general guideline but it suggests that for conference paper you write you should write a journal paper that extends that work. Note, that previosuly, we had a guideline that said a PhD was 4 conference papers and 2 journal papers. The new philosophy fits in with maintaining the research quality within ASAP. At the last RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) the school received a grade 5. In general (and this is very general) a high quality conference paper is grade 4 and a journal paper is grade 5. Therefore, to maintain the research quality we must publish journal papers, rather than conference papers.2.3 Where can I find out about potential conferences?
ASAP maintains a web page of conferences. If you come across one that is not on this page then send an EMAIl to Yong Yang, who is responsible for keeping it up to date.
3.1 What Journals Should I submit To?
This is a difficult question to answer and only your supervisor can really advise but we do maintain a page of target journals, which you might like to consider.
4. Where can I find good reference databases?
The library offers good facilities. Take a look at its eLibrary Gateway and the electronic journals. Note, that for some of these resources you may need to be on campus and/or need an Athens username/password. If you have any difficulties, you should go to the library to ask for help.
There is also a very good computer science search engine at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs.