Tools and Related Resources
Writing and other resources
- Martin Olivier's Information Technology Research - A Practical Guide for Computer Science and Informatics
- This is the companion website for the 3rd edition of the book.
- Justin Zobel's book for computer science writing
- Practical Research Methods: A user-friendly guide to mastering research techniques and projects by Dr Catherine Dawson - free download from the web.
- A book recommended by Stuart Steiner: Practical Research Planning and Design 10th edition ISBN: 978-0-13-269324-0
Referencing styles
When one is doing academic writing it is important to appropriately acknowledge one's sources - to clearly indicate what has been said by others and to which you are referring, and to separate these from what are your own ideas (see the section on Plagiarism below).
It is also very important to do this in a clear and consistent fashion. Hence various referencing styles have been developed.
There are a number of popular referencing styles in two broad classes -- author-date based and numerical. Some of these are discussed below.
- A referencing style guide by Peter Coxhead
- This is an easy to read and very useful source for anyone who is starting to do academic writing,
- The Harvard Referencing Style
- This is one of the more popular author-date referencing styles (and is the one of those recommended for Unisa Masters and Doctoral degrees).
- The IEEE referencing/citation style
- A well known numeric referencing style
Often the institution where you are doing your degree has a recommended (or prescribed) referencing style so you should just follow that style. If there is no recommended style then a good approach is to use a style that is used by one of the key journals in your research area.
Plagiarism
When you are doing academic writing you will need to cite the material (books, journals, etc.) from which you got a piece of information. It is plagiarism to present someone else’s idea, theories, etc. as your own.
Some sources which give more details about plagiarism are given below.
A resource provided by The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Plagiarism: What it is and how to recognize and avoid it
A resource from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.
Many Universities use some form of plagiarism detection software on dissertations and theses. turnitin is one of the most widely used of these tools. turnitin allows lecturers/supervisors to set up "classes" so that students can easily "originality check" their own work.
Research management tools
Using a good reference management tool can greatly reduce the pain of writing a dissertation or thesis.
- Qiqqa Free reference manager and research manager
- Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.
LaTeX
If you are doing a Masters dissertation or PhD thesis which requires any mathematical typesetting then you really must consider using LaTeX for preparing your documents.
And note that Qiqqa and Mendeley integrate quite well with LaTeX.
- TeXnicCenter is an integrated documentation environment (IDE) for LaTeX that integrates all the functionality you need to create, write, build, fix, view and print your LaTeX documents.
- TeXnicCenter is a Windows tool but there are equivalent tools for Macs.
- TeXstudio is an integrated writing environment for creating LaTeX documents. Our goal is to make writing LaTeX as easy and comfortable as possible. Therefore TeXstudio has numerous features like syntax-highlighting, integrated viewer, reference checking and various assistants.
- TeXstudio is open source and is available for all major operating systems.
- The Not So Short Introduction to LateX2 is a fairly short but surprisingly detailed introduction to using LaTeX
The "useful/interesting links" page has some information about LaTeX as well.
The Unisa specific page has some resources for Unisa students.