Reflection

In this assignment, I was tasked with creating a document that critically looked at two research papers and analyzed the structure of the information presented in them with respect to the template provided in the Technical Communication text used in class. This assignment aided me in being able to carefully deconstruct a research article from a journal and really understand the importance of each component of a scientific research article. Because my research articles were so different in terms of style and topics covered, I believe I was able to really differentiate what makes good research from a bad article in terms of how information is presented for the audience. I also got a better understanding of how having a target audience and motivation/purpose for a paper really shapes which components are emphasized for a research article. 

The assignment itself was not hard but the initial stage was the hardest as I had a hard time finding research articles that interested me and also were not too long. My first attempt at finding research articles that fitted this assignment was to simply do a google search. I found this method rather long and tedious as I repeatedly ended up looking at papers that felt like they used a lot of jargon and were difficult to understand. After some careful consideration, I decided to look for research articles written by City College professors (listed in their publication profile on their CCNY profile). These papers were easier to understand and also more accessible than most research papers that I tried to find on my own. I was also careful to look at City College professors in my department doing research that is related to fields that I want to go into. For example, one of the research papers that I chose to analyze is written by an Electrical Engineering professor researching in Hardware Security which is well related to the more general Cyber Security field. As for my second paper, I chose a research paper that related to the topic my group and I had chosen for our final project proposal. These two approaches, as opposed to simply choosing any research paper in engineering, definitely helped me find papers that interested me thus helping me complete the assignment.