Surf the web! There are a variety of indices that can be used to identify interesting papers, tech reports, etc. Once you have found a paper of interest (via the web, hard work or because we spoon-fed it to you), look to see if the authors or their departments have home pages. These may lead you to related articles and/or pre-prints of new work.

The MIT libraries maintain a number of CD-ROM databases that allow you to search periodicals. Most useful at Dewey is ABI/Inform; you have to sign up for time. The LCS/AI reading room has the Inspec and Compendex databases which can be useful for technical searches. There are many other on-line search capabilities including WAIS and First Search; talk to the reference librarians for more information.

Sometimes the easiest way to find articles is to go to the shelf of a particular journal and thumb through the issues. To help you with that, we offer the following list of suggestions for where to dig. Technical magazines are a useful springboard into the research literature: sometimes an interesting magazine article will lead you to a research report published by the same author(s). (One caveat: be alert to biased viewpoints in magazine articles...). Magazines are a good place to get started, but we expect you to go deeper into the literature. You should be citing (and reading!) papers from journals and conference proceedings.

Suggested magazines:

* Communication of the ACM (CACM)

* IEEE Computer, Communications and Network Magazines

* IEEE Spectrum occasionally runs articles on topics related to this course.

Refereed journals:

* IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC)

* ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)

* IEEE Transactions on Communications is occasionally useful.

* Bell Labs / AT&T Technical Journal (LCS only has till 1989; Barker has others)

Conference proceedings:

* Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP)

* ACM SIGCOMM & ACM SIGGRAPH

* Arch. Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS)

* USENIX Conference and Symposium Proceedings

* IEEE Infocom (in LCS and Barker) & IEEE Globecom (in Barker)

The following publications publish timely works that are subject to partial review:

* Operating Systems Review (published by ACM SIGOPS)

* Computer Communications Review (published by ACM SIGCOMM)

* Computer Architecture News (published by ACM SIGARCH)

On economics, policy, and business (in Dewey):

* Business Communications Review

* Telecommunications Policy

For current events (newspapers & trade rags):

* Wall Street Journal

* PC Week & Communications Week

* Computer World & Network World