academic writing-Literature Review

1. What is literature

• Published written works (publications)
• Unpublished written works

2. Why literature review

• First step of research
• Help you obtain background knowledge
• Identify related work to yours
• Understand the state of the art尖端技术 in your project area
• To frame your arguments and research questions based on the state-of-the-art
• Identify knowledge gaps or limitations in your project area

3. Where to find publications

1. ACM Digital Library (https://dl.acm.org/) hosts ACM Journals and ACM Conference Proceedings
2. IEEE Xplore (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/) hosts IEEE Journals and IEEE Conference Proceedings
3. SpringerLink (https://link.springer.com/) hosts Springer Journals (including Nature) and Springer Conference Proceedings
4. ScienceDirect (https://www.sciencedirect.com/) hosts Elsevier Journals and e-books
5. Wiley Online Library (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/) hosts Wiley Journals and e-books
6. Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/) – Web search engine for scholarly literature

4. How to do literature review

• Systematic literature review (SLR) methods
  • Traditional SLR
  • Snowballing

4.1. Traditional SLR

• 使用由一组关键词组成的搜索字符串
• 对每一个已知的数字图书馆进行详尽的搜索
• 旨在选择所有相关的论文
• 耗费时间，而且作为个人很难做到这一点

4.2. Snowballing

1. Identify the start set
   1. Ask your supervisor to suggest 3-5 good quality, relevant papers
   2. Add 3-5 top cited and relevant papers from Google Scholar search
2. Perform backward snowballing
   1. Go through the reference list of each paper in the start set to identify new papers to include
   2. Exclude papers that do not fulfil the basic criteria such as, for example, language, publication year and type of publication
   3. Remove papers from the list that have already been examined in the earlier iteration
   4. Add the remaining papers to the start set
   5. Repeat from step1 将剩余的论文添加到起始集
   6. End if you have gone through the reference list of all the papers in the start set
3. Perform forward snowballing
   1. For each paper in the start set, identify the papers that cite this paper using Google Scholar 使用谷歌学术找出引用该论文的论文
   2. For each citing paper that is not in the start set, download it from its DL, read, in the order of: 1) abstract, 2) introduction, 3) conclusion or 4) full text to see if it’s relevant to your project
   3. Repeat from step 1 until you have gone through all the papers in the start set
4. Iterations
   1. Repeat backward snowballing at least once
   2. Repeat forward snowballing at least once
   3. Iterate from forward snowballing to backward, to ensure a comprehensive inclusion of good quality, relevant papers
   4. The results of iterations are the set of the papers for detailed review and to be included in your dissertation report.
5. Manage your references
   1. EndNote - for Word
   2. BibTex - for Overleaf
   3. Citation and reference styles
      1. Numbering system (IEEE style)
      2. Author and Date system (Harvard style)

5. Critical tasks in literature review

When reading each reference, you need to systematically perform the following tasks:

• Data extraction 数据提取: Extract useful information (data) from each reference
• Data synthesis 数据综合: Organize the extracted data into categories and subcategories
• Data analysis 数据分析: Interpret the data to make sense of them through:
  • Quantitative analysis 定量分析: use statistics and frequency counts to analyse the data
  • Qualitative analysis 定性分析: use descriptions to interpret the data
  • Visualisation 可视化: use tables, charts, graphs to represent the data