Literature Review
What is the Literature Review?
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The ‘finished product’
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i.e. chapter(s) in your dissertation
Extensive reference to relevant research in your area
Sets the scene for why you do the things you did in the way
you did them
What is the Literature Review?
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The ‘process’
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Conducting a review of the literature
Ongoing activity not just at start of the research process
Helps formulate your research question
Helps identify approaches or experimentation
Later helps with analysis and evaluation
Why do I need a Literature review?
(Process)
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Finding out what is happening in your area of research is a
vital step along your journey to discovery,
to find and understand how leading researchers in your
field have tackled similar problems and the results they
obtained, shortcomings they observed and methodologies
they employed
= goals of the literature review process.
Why do I need a literature review?
(Product)
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It shares with the reader with other studies closely
related to your work
It relates your work to the larger, ongoing dialogue in the
literature
It introduces terminology and definitions to clarify how
terms are being used in the context of your work
It shows how your study is filling in gaps and extending
prior studies
It provides a framework for establishing the importance
of your study
It provides a benchmark for comparing the results of your
study with other findings
Introduction
...in other
words...
Introduction
...the literature
review...
Introduction
...is really, really
important.
2D Analysis
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The objective of this process is to systematically analyse
the existing research and classify it in one of two
dimensions.
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The breadth of the review is concerned with ‘setting the
scene’, in terms of describing the foundational research in this
particular domain, there will be research mentioned from each
of the areas you have included in your spider diagram.
The depth of the research concerns itself with the particular
topic work that your research will be built upon. There should
be approximately the same number of research papers covered
in the depth and breath of the research review.
Examples
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Let’s look at three examples
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Knowledge Management
Information Technology
Assistive Technology
2D Analysis
Breadth of Research
Depth of Research
The Literature Review
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To made things clear, we divide the Literature Review into
three parts:
Literature
Survey
Collecting
the literature
Literature
Comprehension
Understanding
the literature
Literature
Review
Reviewing
the literature
The Literature Survey/Search
‘a systematic and thorough search of all types of published literature in order to identify as many items
as possible that are relevant to a particular topic’
Gash, S. (2000) Effective Literature Searching for Research 2 nd Ed., Aldershot: Gower Publishing Ltd.
Literature Survey
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Identifying and acquiring
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the research papers,
textbooks,
web-sites,
theses, etc.
to get a comprehensive overview of the research that
has been done in the area that you are investigating.
Literature Survey
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A focused survey technique is recommended to ensure
you ‘hit the ground running’
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.
Recording the sources you have found and read is also of
vital importance
Literature Survey
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Recording the sources 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.
Sources of information
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Books
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Journal Articles
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Textbooks, specialist collection books, reference books
Peer-reviewed academic articles
Each journal has a specific focus
Review articles
Reports
Theses and dissertations
Conference Proceedings
Media
Good Sources ?
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Journal Papers
Conference Papers
Textbooks
Other Books
Company Whitepapers
Company Websites
Blogs
Wikis
Literature Survey
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A vital step is to identify
KEYWORDS
Literature Survey
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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
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e.g. you are doing research on Communities of practice
What other keywords do we need to look out for?
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Network of practice
Virtual community
Virtual Ethnography
Virtual team
Community-driven knowledge management
Literature Survey
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If you are doing research on one of the following
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Cloud Computing
Knowledge Sharing
Usability
Data Quality
What other keywords do we need to look out for?
Literature Survey
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You need to get a
notebook/create an
electronic artefact you can
access constantly 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.
Snowball Technique
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As you read you will redefine your focus through
searches
You will become familiar with authors and texts
commonly cited and start to look for specific papers
Snowball technique is when you follow up references
from bibliographies of texts you read
Keep a record
Literature Survey
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What does peer-reviewed mean?
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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.
Literature Survey
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What are some good journals?
Who are ACM ?
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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
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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
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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 ?
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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
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IEEE Computational intelligence and AI
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IEEE Transactions on Computers
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IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
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IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
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IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
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IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
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IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
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IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
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IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
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IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
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IEEE Transactions on Haptics
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IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine
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IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
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IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
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IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
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IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience
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IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
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IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
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IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
Emerald Journals
Journal Credibility ?
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As you start to find out more about an area you will start
to see that there are certain journals that people
researching in the area target
When you come across a journal for the first time, a way
of measuring its ‘quality’ is the ranking it has journal
citation reports
Literature Survey
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And any good research sites ?
Research Sites – Library Catalogue
http://library.dit.ie
Research Sites – Search Engines
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Google – http://www.google.com
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Wolfram Alpha
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Dogpile – http://www.dogpile.com
Mamma – http://www.mamma.com
Top 15 search engines 2012
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http://www.wolframalpha.com/tour/examples.html
Metasearch engines
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Google Scholar – http://scholar.google.com
Google Correlate - http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/
http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/search-engines
100 search engines you may never have heard of
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http://edudemic.com/2012/07/best-search-engines/
Research Sites – Bibliographic Databases
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Help you search for articles and papers
Collection of references to work
WebofKnowledge – http://webofknowledge.com
The collection of computer science bibliographies http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/
DBLP Bibliography - http://www.informatik.unitrier.de/~ley/db/
Research Sites – Digital Libraries
Citeseerx
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
Citeseerx
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
http://arxiv.org/archive/cs
WebLens
http://www.weblens.org/scholar.html
INFOMINE (http://infomine.ucr.edu/)
DBLP (http://www.informatik.unitrier.de/~ley/db/)
Gartner (http://www.gartner.com)
Literature Survey
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Searching the Web
Google
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Operators and search help
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Advanced Search
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http://www.google.com/advanced_search
Google Guide
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http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans
wer=136861
http://www.googleguide.com/
Spiders Apprentice
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http://www.monash.com/spidap.html
Google Scholar
Literature Survey
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But remember:
If you just search for “Community of practice” you will miss
out on:
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Network of practice
Virtual community
Virtual Ethnography
Virtual team
Community-driven knowledge management
Exercise
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Look at the following slide and find out the meaning of
each of the terms presented!
hyponyms
antonyms
acronyms
pseudo-synonyms,
or false synonyms
neologisms
phraseologism
hypernyms
PROBLEMS WITH USING
A SEARCH ENGINE AS
THE SOLE SOURCE OF
INFORMATION
quasi-synonyms,
or near-synonyms
Crossreferences
collocation
polysemy
single-concept
principle
tautonyms
synonyms
abbreviations
monosemy
Finding Research online
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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‘
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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
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So the first search to try is
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if this returns 10,000 links then try
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"Project Based Learning"
"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
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To find other 'good' pages relating to your subject
matter, try
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"Project Based Learning Link*"
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"Project Based Learning Portal*"
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for "PBL Portal" or "PBL Portal Page"
"Project Based Learning Webring*"
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for "PBL Links" or "PBL Link Page"
for "PBL Webring" or "PBL Webrings"
"Project Based Learning FAQ*"
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for "PBL FAQ"or "PBL FAQs" or "PBL FAQL"or "PBL FAQLs"
Finding Research online
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If you are looking for papers relating to "Project Based
Learning", try
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"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
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If you are looking for a more specific topic, for example,
"The Impact of the Web on Project Based Learning", try
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"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
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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
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Here is a good tip:
Literature Survey
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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 ?
Exercise – Getting Started
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Your task is to spend 30 mins searching for material
about a trend related to your programme area
Use any or all of the resources mentioned in the lecture
and available to you in the library
Tweet at least once to the group @DITRWSL2012
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Remember to include @DITRWSL2012 in your tweet