Read before you request

In the past three or four years of my study in Canada, I have received numerous emails from fellow students back home requesting for journal articles and other academic resources. When I get such requests, I try to act promptly with enthusiasm. Our students are brilliant and catches things very quickly. They can analyze things very critically. However, their condition is like a powerful machine without any fuel. I (and perhaps others living abroad) take my pleasure to provide them with a little bit of support whenever they need.

To me, supporting an underprivileged group is always encouraging. But at times I get perplexed, especially, when you receive a request like the following:

" Sir, how are you? I need the following book .... Thanks, bye."

I stop for a while as to whether I should respond to such queries at all. Sometime they request for a whole bunch of papers, many of which are available free of cost via Google Scholar. I guess some students do not even read the list; they just copy from the back of a paper and pastes them on a document and sends in. That's it!

So, in order to be able to help students better I am outlining some basic steps that one should follow before requesting for articles/books from me.

If you are looking for journal articles

• please search it first in Google / Google Books / Google Scholar / A9.com for availability of a possible free copy.
• if you are requesting for articles from several journals, please make the list according to journals and in a chronological order. That i.e, put the oldest first, then the newer... or the other way.
  
• do not copy-paste from the back of a paper. Even if you do so, please correct for any typographical errors inherent in them.
• try to show your seriousness, i.e., write a few lines about what steps have you taken to obtain a particular reference.
• do not blindly ask for a research topic. This is for you to take up with your supervisor.

If you are looking for books

Please note that books are the most expensive academic material in any developed country (US, Canada, UK, Australia and so on). Unlike our parts of the world (Bangladesh, India, etc) llibraries in developed countries do not carry textbooks. Textbooks are those books which are necessary for a course. For example, any third-year level Mmathematical Statistics course would have Introduction to Mathematical Statistics by Hogg, McKean and Craig listed as a textbook. Textbooks are for the students to purchase and they are really expensive (e.g., the above mentioned book is priced between $100 to $150 in the US and Canada.

Some books are available online or from other sources which you should try to find from the Internet. Google is the best tool to search for these books. Some forums also have links to such books. Also some file sharing sites (such as www.esnips.com) where PDF versions of some books could be found.

Purchasing books in India or Bangladesh is a lot cheaper than here. Some of the classic books have low priced edition for the students in the Indian subcontinent. It is usually a good idea to contact your local book seller and request them to get a copy of the low priced edition for you.

This talk will be updated as often as it is necessary. Thanks for your understanding. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Last updated: May 10, 2008.