Conferences/Journals for Selecting Papers
Papers should be selected from the following conferences. More conferences and journals may be announced later.The first group is links to the 5 conferences on DBLP. Not all of them require passwords. OSDI and USENIX don't require password. SOSP requires ACM accounts because it is an ACM conference. ICDCS and HOTOS require IEEE accounts.
Fortunately, we have free ACM and IEEE accesses in UIUC domain. The links are provided in the 2nd group. For papers in SOSP, ICDCS, HOTOS, you can follow the links "ACM Digital Library" and "IEEE XPlore". If you are in UIUC domain, you will not be prompted for password and will have direct access to the proceedings. If you are not in UIUC domain (say you work at home), you will be prompted for UIUC netid and password, which you know. Then you will be directed to the papers.
There is another way to get the paper, that is, using search engine. You can use either general search engine such as Google, or bibliography search engine such as ResearchIndex(CiteSeer).
When I search for papers, I normally have 2 cases.
1) I have some preferred keywords in mind or I know the exact title of the paper. Then I will use Google, which in most cases will find the paper, with the first result being the page on ResearchIndex. If that fails, I will try ResearchIndex.
2) I don't know the paper title and I don't know what kind of keywords I should use. But I want to look at a conference proceeding to find if there is any interesting paper. Then I will use DBLP, which has the titles of papers in a lot of conference proceedings. After locating a potential interesting paper, I will switch to 1).