Useful Capstone Resources

Doing Research

• Practical Research: Planning and Design by Leedy, a good reference for what research is and how to do it, in the Macalester library.
• "Of course it's true; I saw it on the Internet: critical thinking in the Internet era", an article in Communications of the ACM by Graham and Metaxas, available through the ACM Digital Library. This is a cautionary article about doing good online research.
• Library's General Research Guides
• Two important indexes are the ACM Digital Library and MathSciNet, but don't stop there, the library has many many more.
• Library catalogs

Writing a good paper

• "A Guide for Writing a Technical Research Paper", by Libby Shoop.
• Some Hints on Mathematical Style" by David Goss.
• Library's page on Citing Resources and Preparing Publications
• Successful technical writing by Hicks, in our very own Macalester library. Other ACTC libraries have similar books.
• Handbook of writing for the mathematical sciences by Higham (you can find other similar books nearby).

Giving a good talk

• How to give a good research talk by Simon Peyton Jones et al.
• Oral Presentation Advice by Mark Hill of the University of Wisconsin (this include a hilarious "How to Give a Bad Talk" by David Patterson).
• How to give a bad (good) talk from the EECS department at Berkeley.
• PowerPointers, a web site that has a very business-oriented feel, but contains many good articles about preparing a presentation and using PowerPoint.
• Public speaking: an audience-centered approach by Beebe and Beebe, in the Macalester Library, along with several other books on public speaking.