Literature Review

What is the Literature Review?  The ‘finished product’  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?  The ‘process’  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)  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)  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  The objective of this process is to systematically analyse the existing research and classify it in one of two dimensions.  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  Let’s look at three examples  Knowledge Management  Information Technology  Assistive Technology

2D Analysis Breadth of Research Depth of Research

The Literature Review  To made things clear, we divide the Literature Review into three parts: Literature Survey Literature Comprehension Literature Review Collecting the literature Understanding the literature 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  Identifying and acquiring  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  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  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  Books  Textbooks, specialist collection books, reference books  Journal Articles  Peer-reviewed academic articles  Each journal has a specific focus  Review articles  Reports  Theses and dissertations  Conference Proceedings  Media

Good Sources ?  Journal Papers  Conference Papers  Textbooks  Other Books  Company Whitepapers  Company Websites  Blogs  Wikis

Literature Survey  A vital step is to identify KEYWORDS

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  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  If you are doing research on one of the following  Cloud Computing  Knowledge Sharing  Usability  Data Quality  What other keywords do we need to look out for?

Literature Survey 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  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  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.

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  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

Emerald Journals

Journal Credibility ?  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  And any good research sites ?

Research Sites – Library Catalogue

Research Sites – Search Engines  Google –  Google Scholar –  Google Correlate -  Wolfram Alpha   Metasearch engines  Dogpile –  Mamma –  Top 15 search engines 2012   100 search engines you may never have heard of 

Research Sites – Bibliographic Databases  Help you search for articles and papers  Collection of references to work  WebofKnowledge –  The collection of computer science bibliographies  DBLP Bibliography - trier.de/~ley/db/ trier.de/~ley/db/

Research Sites – Digital Libraries

Citeseerx

WebLens

INFOMINE (

DBLP ( trier.de/~ley/db/) trier.de/~ley/db/

Gartner (

Literature Survey  Searching the Web

Google  Operators and search help  wer= wer=  Advanced Search   Google Guide   Spiders Apprentice 

Google Scholar

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

Exercise  Look at the following slide and find out the meaning of each of the terms presented!

synonyms acronyms polysemy single-concept principle neologisms monosemy abbreviations quasi-synonyms, or near-synonyms pseudo-synonyms, or false synonyms antonyms phraseologism hyponyms hypernyms collocation Cross- references PROBLEMS WITH USING A 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 ?

Exercise – Getting Started  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  Remember to in your tweet