Computer Science

Safari e-book Collection

For Computer Science, Math, and Technology research, a good place to start is with the Safari Books collection. This collection of eBooks provides access to over 300 O'Reilly programming and technology books and more.

Books will give you background information and an overview on what you are researching. You need this information in order to provide context.

Physical & online books available at CSUSM can be located in the following ways:

1. Search the Library Catalog (use dropdown left-hand side for search types: subject, author, etc.)
                                                     
2. Search for an e-book, by choosing an e-book database from the list and using the search bar to enter terms
   • Off-campus access requires log-in with CSUSM User ID and Password

Options to obtain books not located at CSUSM:

1. Order books through CSU+
   • If you locate a book via OneSearch catalog and it states "Print version not available in the library" you can order the book via CSU+, which is a library borrowing service that includes all 23 CSU campus libraries.  It takes approximately 2-5 days to receive books from CSU+.
                                                       
2. Order books through InterLibrary Loan
   • You can search the collections of libraries world-wide by using WorldCat.  If you find a book you would like to order and verify that you cannot get it through CSUSM or CSUSM, you can fill out an InterLibrary Loan request.  Materials will take 5-10 days to arrive and can be picked up at our Library.

Once you have a good overview of your research topic, find and read journal articles to develop a deeper understanding of what is known and not known on your topic. Research studies most often take the form of journal articles and investigate a very specific aspect of a particular issue. In computer science, papers in conference proceedings also tend to be an important source of information on recent research. Popular magazines and newspapers are a good topical source for general, business, opinion, and social-impact articles on computing.

Search for articles

ACM Digital Library 
A collection of over 200,000 journal articles and conference proceedings from the Association of Computing Machinery. Use interlibrary loan to request full text of the articles and proceedings.

ScienceDirect
Provides full text access to over 1,000 journals covering all fields of science. 

Academic Search Premier
A large, multi-disciplinary database offering full text for nearly 1,850 scholarly journals, including more than 1,250 peer-reviewed titles. Many are available in full-text.

Wiley Online Library
Multi-disciplinary database providing access to abstracts and full text from journals, reference works, databases, and books.

Computing Research Repository (CoRR)
Free online repository of electronic preprints (articles which have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals).

In Computer Science, the most commonly used citation styles are IEEE and ACM. 

IEEE Citation Style

The IEEE Citation Style is based upon the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines. Refer to the Author Digital Tools and the IEEE Citation Reference guide on the IEEE website for comprehensive guidelines.

In-text citations
Use square brackets, treat as footnotes. The numbers contained within the brackets refer to the number of the reference in your works cited list.

For example: as shown by Brown [4]; demonstrated by Jones and Smith [5]

Reference List Examples

• ​Journal article / conference proceedings

A. B. Last Name, "Name of paper," Abbrev. Title of Periodical, vol. x, no. x, pp. xx-xx, Abbrev. Month, year. 

R. E. Kalman, "New results in linear filtering and prediction theory," J. Basic Eng., ser. D, vol. 83, pp. 95-108, Mar. 1961.

• Entire book

A. B. Author, "Title of chapter in the book," in Title of Published Book, X. Editor Last name, Ed., xth ed. City of Publisher, Country if not USA: Abbrev. of Publisher, year, ch. x, sec. x, pp. xx-xx.

L. Stein, "Random patterns," in Computers and You, J. S. Brake, Ed. New York: Wiley, 1994, pp. 55-70.

• Web document

A. B. Author. (Year, Month Day). Title [Type of medium]. Available: URL

J. Jones. (1991, May 10). Networks [Online]. Available: http://www.atm.com

ACM Citation Style

Refer to the ACM Journals Word Style Guide for a comprehensive overview of the various ACM journals citation styles.

In-text citation examples

One author: [Author last name year] → [Smith 2005]

Two authors: [Author 1 and Author 2 year] → [Smith and Jones 2005]

Three or more authors: [Author 1 et al. year] → [Smith et al. 2005]

Reference list examples

• ​Journal article

Author First Name Last Name. Year. Article title. Journal Abbreviation Vol, Issue (Month Year), pp-pp. DOI

Patricia S. Abril and Robert Plant. 2007. The patent holder's dilemma: Buy, sell, or troll? Commun. ACM 50, 1 (Jan. 2007), 36-44. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1188913.1188915

• Entire book

Author First Name Last Name. Year. Title of Book (Edition number ed.). Publisher, City, State of Publication.

David Kosiur. 2001. Understanding Policy-Based Networking (2nd. ed.). Wiley, New York, NY.

• Conference proceedings

Author First Name Last Name. Year. Presentation title. In Conference Proceedings Title. Publisher, Place of Publication, pp-pp. DOI

Sten Andler. 1979. Predicate Path expressions. In Proceedings of the 6th. ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL '79). ACM Press, New York, NY, 226-236. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/567752.567774

• Web document

Author Name. Year. Title of Web Document/Page. (Month Year). Retrieved Month Date, Year from URL

Harry Thornburg. 2001. Introduction to Bayesian Statistics. (March 2001). Retrieved March 2, 2005 from http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/bayes/bayes.html