Managing Your Literature ReviewHan van Triest (高汉 )

Disclaimer

DisclaimerThere are many waysThere are many toolsI am not affiliated with any of the companies or tools

What is a Literature Study?

An overview of what has been studiedMore than a summaryGroups and organizes resultsIdentifies room for improvement

When to do a Literature Study?

At the start of a projectAt the start of a paperAt the start of a thesis

Why write a Literature Review?

To define and limit the problemTo place your study in a contextTo avoid duplicationTo evaluate existing methods

We cannot do research alone!

Searching: Where to begin?

Determine your topicWrite a set of keywordsDetermine the most relevant search enginesEngineering -> IEEEMathematics -> SpringerLinkMedical -> PubMedLife Sciences -> ScienceDirectGeneral -> Google Scholar

Searching: Where to begin?

Find a review paperKeywords:

ReviewSurveyOverview

Information Sources

How useful are the following sources?Journal ArticlesBooksConference ProceedingsGovernment/corporate reportsTheses and dissertationsInternetMagazines

http://web.pdx.edu/~bertini/pdf/literature_review.pdf

Exclusion/Inclusion

Do not search for everything!Select a date rangeDesign a fixed set of keywordsUse advanced search optionsLimit your search to specific topicsLimit your search to recent publicationsSearch in the relevant search engines

Backward Searching

Backward Searching: Find earlier referencesTry to guess the indexFirst, try specific indexSecond, try Google ScholarThird, try Google

Forward Searching

Backward searching leads to older references

How to find new references?http://scholar.google.com/http://apps.webofknowledge.com

Search on names of authors on this topic

Search on Groups and Authors

What name to search for?What is the meaning of the author order?

Reading the references

How to read references?Start with the titleRead the abstractLook at the imagesRead the conclusionRead the introductionScan the referencesScan through the rest of the textWrite a small summary

Managing the references

How to manage these references?Use a reference manager:http://www.mendeley.com/

Write brief summariesGroup similar topics togetherAdd Tags

Organize your references

Create a concept mapMindJet MindManagerXmind...

Group similar methods/resultsOrder references logicallyCollect Quotes

Start Writing

Write down section titlesWrite down keywords in the right order

Group keywords into paragraphsAdd text to the paragraphs

... And use your reference manager!

Questions?

Links

Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com Mind Mappers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_

and_mind-mapping_software Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed ScienceDirect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/ IEEExplorer: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org SpringerLink: http://link.springer.com/ Anki (FlashCards) http://ankisrs.net/