Best Approach to Find Implementation Details of the Existing Research Papers

Research/ Ph.D. in Computer Science and other engineering fields is very different from that of research in other sciences. It includes research implementation over software and the codes are available online. Understanding research is one of the most crucial stage for beginning with research. Initially, it takes 20 to 30 days to understand the research paper. It is good practice to use the existing research works for future reference.

It has been observed that 83% of peer reviewed research journals are looking forward for those research papers which compare their research work with existing ones.  The research implementation of the existing techniques can be obtained from the authors or different resources which have been discussed in this section.

Some of the most promising approaches to find research implementation code for the existing research papers have been discussed in this manuscript. Usually, you get the information from original authors of the research paper. You should connect with the corresponding author of the paper. Corresponding author is the one who should be connected for any concerns with respect to the research paper. It should be noted that it is not necessary for a corresponding author to be the first author of the paper.

GitHub

One of the most successful approaches to get the implementation details of the existing research works are to follow the GitHub links.  There many research papers which give the repository link of the GitHub of their research implementations.

How do I find research papers which have the research implementation in the GitHub

Can you search for research papers those are relevant to you what domain,  you explore Google Scholar.  In the query link enter the set of keywords  which are related to research domain. Enter star * and the GitHub

This will end list all those research papers which have their implementation in GitHub and from which you can download the implementation details of the research paper. This is so because the Google search engine matches the words with the research papers. The footnotes of such research papers usually contain the link to Github repository if they keep research implementation open for public.

Send Emails

One of the most useful tools in terms of research is to use the networking among those researchers who are working in the same field in which you are working. You need to send emails to those resource persons whose papers you have read and the research implementation which you want. You can ask for the code but it is less likely that they provide you the code. This is because most of the researchers are working with government agencies or with those who are funding them. So, they do not provide code. Infact, there could be some missing information which you may need to assume before implementing such proposed algorithms. Nevertheless, this approach is 32% successful in obtaining implementation code of the existing research paper.

What if Author do not respond to email

1. You may check the list of research papers and authors who have cited the original paper. Some of them may also have compared their work with this research paper algorithm. You may always try to connect with the author of these research papers via email. You may end up getting some link to the original author’s new email id or contact number, if not code.
2. You may try to connect with the author at LinkedIn, ResearchGate or Academic. These are professional social media platforms which can help you to link with the resource person.
3. You may try connecting them through their students (Post Doc or Doctorate). This is good approach to connect with resource person. With this, you will have good idea of what to write in the email and how to approach the resource person.

Tips to send an Email to the Author

Whenever, you write an email to the researcher, you should be very humble and do not forget to mention that you will be citing his/ her research work in the references of your research paper. Also, it will be an added advantage to offer him the acknowledgement in your research paper. Before that, discuss with your fellow authors. Also, try to pick his/ her current research work and try to offer future collaborations (if you are not a student or research scholar because they take faculty and industrialist seriously). Send an email from your official university account only.

Many Research Papers are published without Code. Why?

This is because most of the academic researchers in technical fields can’t code. In computer vision, they just hack something together in a single Matlab file. They like to think that coding is for undergrads. They believe it’s beneath them to waste their time on such trivialities. Most of them never learned good software engineering practices and don’t have an understanding of the complexity and skill it takes to write good code.

The major problem is that this is supported by researchers because all academia cares about is publishing, quantity over quality.

Success is measured by how many citations you have, not by how good your contributions are. At the end of the day, when the only people citing you themselves don’t produce anything useful, it doesn’t matter. It’s not science anymore as much as it is “research for the sake of doing research”.

It is good practice to skip such research papers which do not have any authenticity and follow only significant research papers in your domain. The number of such research papers are usually reduced in SCI/ SCIE indexed journal papers and core ranked conference research papers for they provide complete research implementation details of their experiments.

With this, we hope that we were successful in providing you with useful information about how to approach the scientist or a researcher for their implementation codes. It should be noted that you may choose to follow similar approaches to fetch the dataset for your research work.

Happy Learning!