Web 2.0 tools can help in following a particular field for new publications. In addition to using Google Scholar to find new papers by monitoring which recent papers cite a certain seminal paper, RSS can help to monitor the field. As Daniel Lemire urged researchers to make their publications available through RSS in 2005, other services offer RSS feeds now. I try to give a brief overview on some that I use the most.

Preprints – arXiv

An archive for preprints of computer science papers (and other fields) which are not peer-reviewed is provided by arXiv, funded by Cornell University and the National Science Foundation. Currently, arXiv hosts more than half-million articles. Due to its popularity, it is worthwhile to follow submissions to categories of personal interest, e.g. Networking and Internet Architecture. More categories are provided at the home page of arXiv.

However, while it is painful to visit interesting categories frequently to follow new submissions made, it can be made faily easy by using RSS along with a feedreder. The whole procedure is described here. Example feed: Networking and Internet Architectures.

Journals – IEEE Transactions

Even the IEEE provides an RSS feed for papers in ther recent issues(e.g. Transactions on Multimedia or Transactions on Networking), which makes it very easy to monitor high-impact journals.

By keyword – CiteULike

A by keyword search can be monitored using CiteULike, which is a Web 2.0 service for reference sharing. An example can be found for QoE here (see the RSS feed here).

My journal paper entitled Stochastic Packet Loss Model to Evaluate QoE Impairments that appeared in issue 1 / 2009 of the PIK journal is now online.

As the SIGCOMM 2008, held in Seattle this year, is getting closer, I noticed that the accepted papers are now available online. They can be accessed here. A group of researchers in my group at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories will present their Time Machine, which allows later inspection of network activity that becomes interesting in retrospect.

Edit: Serveral papers are reviewed in the blog of Michael Mitzenmacher.

I rececived a pointer to a mindmap illustrating steps that should be considered when writing a good research paper. This mindmap can be seen here.