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General Research Resources

ISI Web of Knowledge provides an inimitable tool, ISI Web of Science, for mapping citation relationships in research literature.

The Research Methods Knowledge Base, 2nd Edition. provides my favorite online guide to behavioral research methodologies, authored and maintained by William M. Trochim.

MITECS or the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, provides a valuable jumping-off point to study many of the reference disciplines for MIS. If your university subscribes to it, the above link takes you to a full-text version. If your professor has contributed an entry to it, he or she has an electronic full-text copy.

Topic Index, part of the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, provides valuable introductions to six topics in cognitive science: computational intelligence, linguistics, culture and evolution, neurosciences, philosophy, and psychology, as well as hundreds of entries on topics of interest to MIS researchers.

Statistics Resources

Electronic Statistics Textbook by StatSoft Inc., provides my favorite online guide to statistics.

The R Project for Statistical Computing provides my favorite statistics software, an open-source, free version of S-PLUS, the language (and associated software package) of choice for leading statisticians. My experience of using this software has been reminiscent of learning to drive a Ferrari 308, difficult but rewarding. For those who prefer minivans, SAS, SPSS, Minitab, Statistica, and similar alternatives are available.

• The Comprehensive R Archive Network provides a couple of hundred packages of R functions to do many things of interest to MIS researchers. R Package Sources provides a list of contributed packages, or you can navigate to it from the main page The Comprehensive R Archive Network as mentioned above. Following are a couple of examples.

• Devore5 provides code and examples for the textbook from which I first learned statistics.

• sem provides tools for structural equation modeling. The pictures automatically produced by this tool require another open-source, free tool, GraphViz (described below under Graphics Resources), to convert into any of the popular graphics formats.

Some resources for S-Plus include splusp.pdf, of which i've made a local copy splusp.pdf (local). This 508 page intro to S-Plus was written by biostatistics professors at the University of Virginia, who have a substantial archive of S-Plus tools and statistical computing tools in general at Statistical Computing Tools and Documents, including movies, source code, guides, quick reference sheets, pointers to commercial sources, and more.

I subscribe to the S-news listserv and you can by emailing s-news-request@wubios.wustl.edu with a body consisting only of
subscribe s-news

I use a book (called V and R on the listserv) whose homepage is Modern Applied Statistics with S-Plus and which is also mentioned at Brian Ripley's Home Page

I have a publicly accessible directory in my u.arizona.edu shell account with some (disorganized) examples for any students interested in using S-Plus on our Unix cluster. If you have a shell account, you can say
cd ~mcquaid/stats
to look at that material. The main file of interest is splus.intro, but I stress that it is old and disorganized and really only helps with the problems I had the first day or two I used S-Plus on Unix.

Research Resources: pdfTeX

I use pdfTeX to create documents that have five important properties. These documents should

1. be easy to view at high resolution on screen on any platform,
2. be easy to print on any high resolution printer,
3. display exactly as I intend, so that there are no ambiguities about equations, program listings, diagrams or other materials that are sloppily displayed by typical word processors,
4. be based on relatively bug-free software, so any time I spend learning the package is not wasted on learning how to work around bugs, and
5. be available without proprietary restrictions, so I can just tell you what to download to exactly replicate what I'm doing.

www.tug.org/applications/pdftex is a great resource about pdfTeX in particular.

I used to use pdfLaTeX and pdfscreen.sty on Win98 , and wrote the following paragraphs to help people install it. Now I use Mac OS X which offers several useful pdfTex packages. I decided to leave these Win98 things here for the time being, although it's getting easier every day to switch your Wintel hardware to Linux without suffering from (the formerly severe) lack of device support. For Win98, I needed the following files, in order to produce documents like splusp.pdf (see above for more about this file). I already had MikTeX (no, it's not named after me!), so I could invoke pdflatex on a LaTeX file and expect it to produce a .pdf file, but to make a nice on-screen version, I needed pdfscreen.sty and some associated files, which I've zipped up into pdfscr.zip. You can unzip these files into your latex source files directory, then you can process files like the above mentioned splusp.pdf. Also, if you want to print something like that on 8.5x11 inch paper, without the onscreen menus, you can just change the word "screen" to "print" at the beginning of your source file and run it through pdflatex to get something like splus.pdf, which is suitable for printing. I've only included the files TeX shouted for in pdfscr.zip, so your version may shout for some I already had. I dealt with that by producing my first document while i had a web browser open to CTAN, so I could just download individual files as TeX complained about missing them.

So the steps to follow are

1. Download and install something you find at Interesting TeX URLs-Free Implementations depending on platform,
2. Copy the files from pdfscr.zip into your latex source directory.
3. Open a web browser to CTAN, so you can download any needed files.
4. Open a command line interface (DOS, 4NT, Bash, or whatever), so you can see error messages, and make your LaTeX source directory your working directory.
5. Try to process the sample file, maria.tex, using pdflatex. Compare the output to mariax.pdf to see if you have problems. By the way, I changed some of the colors in pdfscreen.sty, so your title and url colors will look different from those mariax.pdf. If you prefer mustard and magenta, just overwrite my pdfscreen.sty with one from CTAN.
6. If it's not working but you can't see the error messages, try looking at maria.log, since some messages won't stop the process.

Graphviz provides a robust, free, popular, open-source tool for drawing graphs and similar diagrams. In particular, many diagram types seen in MIS, such as the path diagrams of structural equation modeling, ER diagrams, and the standard diagram types of UML, are supported. Pictures can be exported to a wide variety of popular formats, such as jpeg and pdf.

MetaPost is from Bell Labs, like Graphviz (described above). MetaPost is my favorite graphics language. I export Graphviz output to MetaPost for fine-tuning and export MetaPost to pdf for display. MetaPost has received its most visible use drawing most of the pictures in the newest edition of The Art of Computer Programming an important series of books, recently named as one of the 12 important physical science monographs of the 20th century by American Scientist among the "100 books that shaped a century of science." There are a couple of GUIs available for MetaPost, but I find myself returning over and over to just writing the algebraic description of what I want to draw.

Research Resources: other tools

Mac OS X seems increasingly like the ideal platform for an academic researcher needing (1) tools to write code to illustrate ideas ready for implementation and (2) tools to produce graphics and video to illustrate new ideas not yet ready for implementation.

www.vim.org hosts my favorite text editor, Vim, amazingly faithful to the first editor I ever learned, vi, and yet relentlessly adding features that I don't have adapt to until I have time for them.

When I used Windows, I used to visit www.ztree.com often because of frequent updates of this Xtree-like package for Win32.