Literature Survey, Literature Comprehension, & Literature Review

The Literature Survey

Literature Survey

The literature survey is the process of identifying and acquiring the research papers, textbooks, web-sites, theses, etc. that you will require to get a comprehensive overview of the research that has been done in the area that you are investigating.

A focused survey technique is recommended to ensure you ‘hit the ground running’ and using this technique you are almost immediately in a position to implement experiments.

Literature Survey

Recording the papers you have found and read is also of vital importance, and techniques and software available for these tasks are also covered in this section.

If you know the exact domain of your research it makes sense to initially focus your search on papers that relate (almost) exactly to your own research, rather than spending a great deal of time reading every paper under the sun that seems remotely relevant.

Literature Survey

A vital step is to identify

KEYWORDS

Literature Survey e.g. you are doing research on

Communities of practice What other keywords do we need to look

out for?

Literature Survey e.g. you are doing research on

Communities of practice What other keywords do we need to look

out for? Network of practice Virtual community Virtual Ethnography Virtual team Community-driven knowledge management

Literature Survey

You need to get a notebook that you carry with you, and list all the keywords in there.

Use that to record ideas you have about your research.

Use it to record details of meetings with your supervisor.

Insert any useful newspaper articles, pictures, etc. that help.

Literature Survey

Using these keywords, go to the library and go online and look for journal papers, books, conference papers, etc. that are relevant.

Just using Google is insufficient, you need to search in the real world as well.

Literature Survey

What does peer-reviewed mean? When you submit a research paper, a number of people

will read the paper and give feedback/corrections on it. The people who review it will be as expert as you are in

the field of research (and as such are your peers). Some conferences only get one person to review a

paper, others get two, others more – the more people that review conference papers, the more prestigious the conference is, since the papers in it are bound to be of very quality.

Journal papers are normally reviewed by several people, and are considered very credible.

Good Sources ?

Journal Papers Conference Papers Textbooks Other Books Company Whitepapers Company Websites Blogs Wikis

Literature Survey

What are some good journals?

Who are ACM ?

The Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009. ACM is organized into over 170 local chapters and 35 Special Interest Groups (SIGs), through which it conducts most of its activities. Many of the SIGs, like SIGGRAPH, SIGPLAN, SIGCSE and SIGCOMM, sponsor regular conferences which have become famous as the dominant venue for presenting new innovations in certain fields. The groups also publish a large number of specialized journals, magazines, and newsletters.

ACM SIGs

SIGACCESS - Accessible Computing SIGACT - Algorithms and Computation Theory SIGAda - Ada Programming Language SIGAPP - Applied Computing SIGARCH - Computer Architecture SIGART - Artificial Intelligence SIGBED - Embedded Systems SIGCAS - Computers and Society SIGCHI - Computer-Human Interaction SIGCOMM - Data Communication SIGCSE - Computer Science Education SIGDA - Design Automation SIGDOC - Design of Communication SIGecom - Electronic Commerce SIGEVO - Genetic and Evolutionary Computation SIGGRAPH - Computer Graphics and Interactive

Techniques SIGIR - Information Retrieval

SIGITE - Information Technology Education SIGKDD - Knowledge Discovery in Data SIGMETRICS - Measurement and Evaluation SIGMICRO - Microarchitecture SIGMIS - Management Information Systems SIGMM - Multimedia SIGMOBILE - Mobility of Systems, Users,

Data and Computing SIGMOD - Management of Data SIGOPS - Operating Systems SIGPLAN - Programming Languages SIGSAC - Security, Audit and Control SIGSAM - Symbolic and Algebraic

Manipulation SIGSIM - Simulation and Modeling SIGSOFT - Software Engineering SIGSPATIAL - SIGSPATIAL SIGUCCS - University and College

Computing Services SIGWEB - Hypertext, Hypermedia and Web

Who else ?

Another significant group are IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) called “eye-triple-e” is a professional organization for the advancement of technology, it also publishes a number journals,

including IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

IEEE Transactions

IEEE Computational intelligence and AI IEEE Transactions on Computers IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence IEEE Transactions on Services Computing IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing IEEE Transactions on Haptics IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing IEEE Transactions on Multimedia IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

Literature Survey

And any good research sites ?

Google Scholar

http://arxiv.org/archive/cs

WebLenshttp://www.weblens.org/scholar.html

INFOMINE

DBLP

Gartner

Literature Survey

Searching the Web

Literature Survey But remember: If you just search for “Community of

practice” you will miss out on: Network of practice Virtual community Virtual Ethnography Virtual team Community-driven knowledge management

synonyms

acronyms

polysemy

single-conceptprinciple

neologisms

monosemyabbreviations

quasi-synonyms,or near-synonyms

pseudo-synonyms,or false synonymsantonyms

phraseologism

hyponyms

hypernyms

collocation Cross-

references

PROBLEMS WITH USINGA SEARCH ENGINE AS THE SOLE SOURCE OF

INFORMATION

tautonyms

Finding Research online Effective Searching Let us consider searching for information relating

to 'Project-Based Learning'

The Hyphen The first thing to note is the hyphen between the

words 'Project' and 'Based', will every web-page relating to this subject have the hyphen in it, or will some just leave it out. If you just leave it out the search engines will find the phrase with or without the hyphen.

Finding Research online So the first search to try is

"Project Based Learning" if this returns 10,000 links then try

"Project Based Learning" "PhD Thesis" "Project Based Learning" "Masters Thesis“ “Project Based Learning” “Masters Thesis”

Declaration this may return PhD or Masters thesis on the

subject you require information on.

Finding Research online To find other 'good' pages relating to

your subject matter, try "Project Based Learning Link*"

for "PBL Links" or "PBL Link Page" "Project Based Learning Portal*"

for "PBL Portal" or "PBL Portal Page" "Project Based Learning Webring*"

for "PBL Webring" or "PBL Webrings" "Project Based Learning FAQ*"

for "PBL FAQ"or "PBL FAQs" or "PBL FAQL"or "PBL FAQLs"

Finding Research online If you are looking for papers relating to "Project

Based Learning", try "Project Based Learning" Bibliography "Project Based Learning" Literature Review "Project Based Learning" Literature Survey "Project Based Learning" Overview "Project Based Learning" “A Roadmap”

Unlike the previous section where we were looking for 'good' pages and put the entire phrase in double quotes, in this section we are only putting the subject matter we are investigating in quotes and the rest of the terms are free text, in this way we can find pages which may not be titled, for example, "Project Based Learning Bibliography", but may be a bibliography which contain references to Project Based Learning.

Finding Research online If you are looking for a more specific topic, for

example, "The Impact of the Web on Project Based Learning", try "Impact of the Web on Project Based Learning" (unlikely) "Project Based Learning" overview web "Project Based Learning" survey web "Project Based Learning" review web "Project Based Learning" assessment web

Finding Research online Also consider web-sites which will be using the

acronym for "Project Based Learning" so try "PBL" "P.B.L." Consider the acronym for "Virtual Learning

Environments", it could be "VLE"or "VLEs"or "V.L.E."or "V.L.E.s"or "V.L.Es", so try

"VLE*" "V.L.E*"

Literature Survey

Here is a good tip:

Literature Survey

Find an up-to-date thesis that is closely related to your research question (your supervisor should be able to help you with this, if not, search the web) and use this as a launch pad to your research This is a very useful starting point since it will give you an immediate overview of your research field.

Some Considerations When Using A Thesis As A Starting Point

Regional Variations : Different countries, different regions and even different universities have differing standards for their dissertations, so, whilst the dissertation is a useful starting point, it can only be considered as such, and is not a template for your own work.

Correspondence of Research : The dissertation that you are using should have a significant overlap with your own research, but there are bound to be differences, therefore, your own literature review will be very different to the one you have found, since yours is aimed at highlighting the ‘gap’ that you wish to address.

Quality of Research : The quality of the dissertation is something you will need to consider, how comprehensive is this person’s work ? Have they missed any important papers or major blocks of research ?

Literature Survey

Bibliography Software:

ZoteroFree

BibTeXFree

PybliographerFree

Biblioscape

EndNote

Mendeley

Qiqqa

Reference Manager

Literature Survey

When have you found enough papers?

Literature Survey

When have you found enough papers?

There is no hard-and-fast rule, but my own suggestion is about 50 papers – you don’t have to review them yet, just have them printed out in a pile.