Almost by accident I stumbled onto a research topic, and I already wrote a sample application to boot! (I’ve reserved the right to say “to boot,” by the way). During a course this past quarter at Drexel, I had to come up with an idea and write an application implementing that idea. The idea was to allow a user to reorganize their file system on-the-fly, in order to better find files during a search, and in general. The application, written in Java, does just that.

Now I’m writing a paper based on the idea, and am planning to submit it for journal publication. For full disclosure, I already wrote the paper, but I’m sure I’ll have to rewrite once I get some input from a reliable source.

I seem to be going through the citation process backwards, though, in that all of the ideas in the paper are based solely on my own observations and thinking. I’m literally looking for papers to cite that forward the points I’ve come up with on my own. And amazingly, I am finding them. Citations in an academic paper are important (although I don’t agree with the level of their importance) because they (supposedly) act as proof of premises in your logical argument.

So for example, I make the claim, “Desktop search is different from Internet search because during desktop search the user is most likely searching explicitly for a specific object they already know they have, as opposed to Internet search where the user is looking implicitly for the best possible match to a query.” If I don’t cite a paper where somebody talks about this it is not worth a damn. Of course there could be 10 other papers that claim that not to be true, but whatever. Point is I’m finding citations and all should be good.

Incidentally, I am officially a student now at NJIT, but haven’t officially left Drexel yet. I think if I just stop registering for courses they should be able to figure it out.
As was mentioned in an earlier post, I actually decided to stay at Drexel and possibly take a course or two at NJIT.