How To?
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First step, the review:

First of all, you will need to review the bulk of the work done in the area of you interests. This involves reading, classifying, reading, analysis, and again reading.

With the help of modern technology this can be done fairly easily via the Internet. Here is the classification of the search engines/electronic libraries of publications/papers which are worth to look at:

Resource Description
www.researchindex.com Index of research papers, freely available on the Internet. Caches PDF and PS publications. Automatically supports references across papers.
www.acm.org Association of Computing Machinery. You will need to join the community in order to use its electronic library of research papers. If the theme of you research intersects with ACM's SIGs, conferences, and so on, then you should definitely join this society.
www.vldb.org Very Large Database. Articles from VLDB conferences are available for free.
www.ieee.org IEEE. If someone benefited from joining this society, please drop me a line.
groups.google.com USENET conferences search engine. Apart from many technical and non-technical themes there are some conferences on research subjects, e.g. ai.fuzzy on fuzzy logic/sets/numbers, etc.
Any other search engine such as www.google.com, www.altavista.com. When you have discovered the most respected scientists in the area of you research, you may become interested in their publications. These lists may be found on their personal Home Pages (just like mine).

Don not forget visit physical library (not an electronic one). There you may find some old publications, conference proceedings and books, which are hard to be found on the Internet. Here again you may utilize the benefits of the Internet by using electronic catalogs (e.g. for GPNTB's you may look at www.gpntb.ru).

Take a look at the following papers which describe how to do research, present papers, give a good talk, and so forth:

David Chapman, How To Do Research at the MIT AI Lab?
Simon L.P. Jones, John Hughes, John Launchbury, How To Give a Good Research Talk
Marvin V. Zelkowitz, Guidelines on Preparing an ICSE Paper
Ian Parberry, A Guide for New Referees in Theoretical Computer Science
Alan Bundy, Ben du Boulay, Jim Howe and Gordon Plotkin, The Researcher's Bible
Ian Parberry, How to Present a Paper in Theoretical Computer Science: A Speaker's Guide for Students

© Aleksey Burdakov, 1999-2002