Download Part 2 - Damian Gordon

Literature Survey,
Literature Comprehension, &
Literature Review
The Literature Survey
Literature Survey
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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
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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
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A vital step is to identify
KEYWORDS
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?
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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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
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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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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.
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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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
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
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And any good research sites ?
Google Scholar
http://arxiv.org/archive/cs
WebLens
http://www.weblens.org/scholar.html
INFOMINE
DBLP
Gartner
Literature Survey
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Searching the Web
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
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', 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 ?
Literature Survey
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Bibliography Software:
Zotero
Free
BibTeX
Free
Pybliographer
Free
Biblioscape
EndNote
Mendeley
Qiqqa
Reference Manager
Literature Survey
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When have you found enough papers?
Literature Survey
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When have you found enough papers?
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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.