Managing Your Literature Review Han van Triest ( 高汉 )

Disclaimer  Disclaimer  There are many ways  There are many tools  I am not affiliated with any of the companies or tools

What is a Literature Study?  An overview of what has been studied  More than a summary  Groups and organizes results  Identifies room for improvement

When to do a Literature Study?  At the start of a project  At the start of a paper  At the start of a thesis

Why write a Literature Review?  To define and limit the problem  To place your study in a context  To avoid duplication  To evaluate existing methods  We cannot do research alone!

Searching: Where to begin?  Determine your topic  Write a set of keywords  Determine the most relevant search engines  Engineering-> IEEE  Mathematics -> SpringerLink  Medical-> PubMed  Life Sciences-> ScienceDirect  General-> Google Scholar

Searching: Where to begin?  Find a review paper  Keywords:  Review  Survey  Overview

Information Sources  How useful are the following sources?  Journal Articles  Books  Conference Proceedings  Government/corporate reports  Theses and dissertations  Internet  Magazines

Exclusion/Inclusion  Do not search for everything!  Select a date range  Design a fixed set of keywords  Use advanced search options  Limit your search to specific topics  Limit your search to recent publications  Search in the relevant search engines

Backward Searching  Backward Searching:  Find earlier references  Try to guess the index  First, try specific index  Second, try Google Scholar  Third, try Google

Forward Searching  Backward searching leads to older references  How to find new references?    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 title  Read the abstract  Look at the images  Read the conclusion  Read the introduction  Scan the references  Scan through the rest of the text  Write a small summary

Managing the references  How to manage these references?  Use a reference manager:   Write brief summaries  Group similar topics together  Add Tags

Organize your references  Create a concept map  MindJet MindManager  Xmind   Group similar methods/results  Order references logically  Collect Quotes

Start Writing  Write down section titles  Write down keywords in the right order  Group keywords into paragraphs  Add text to the paragraphs ... And use your reference manager!

Questions?

Links  Mendeley:  Mind Mappers: mapping_softwarehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind- mapping_software  Google Scholar:  PubMed:  ScienceDirect:  IEEExplorer:  SpringerLink:  Anki (FlashCards)