Paper Survey

Very often, literature survey is the first step in identifing
a research topic. This article describes few steps in literature survey:

o Collecting recent research papers. 
	- from library
	- from internet
	- Note: especially, from the proceedings of international technical
    conferences. Many conferences have their own web site and usually
	have abstracts published in web. This helps you to identify what are
	current topics in the research community. You can go one step
	further by looking up authors' personal page to download the paper. 

o What I should do with all the research papers I've collected?

	You can write up one page summary for each paper with following content:

1. Aim: What is the main purpose of this paper? What's the problem(s) the
author(s) attempt to attack? What is the ultimate goal for this research?
2. Contributions: What is the contribution of this paper to this field?
How does this paper distinguish itself from others?
3. Limitations: What are the limitations of the proposed approach in this paper?
Does the proposed scheme limit to certain conditions?
4. Comparison: Is there any similar research papers available? If so,
 what is the difference among them?
5. Observation: What is my personal observation/opinions of this paper?
Is there any alternative solution (or better solution) than the proposed
scheme?
6. Questions: Do not expect to fully understand all of the content in
this paper! Highlight the sections that you don't understand.

Make a copy of this checklist and attach it to each paper you read.
Shuffle it and organize it in any combination you prefer. You might come
up with different ideas and realize the connection among several papers.
Put the author and title of that paper on the top of this
survey sheet.  You may include your own personal index number, if
available.

At the end, you should be able to classify all the published papers into
several categories. This helps you to organize all the research papers
and their contributions.