Literature Survey, Comprehension & Review

1. Literature Survey, Comprehension & Review

2. Introduction • 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 are the goals of the literature review process.

3. 2D Analysis • The objective of this process is to systematically analyse the existing research and classify it in one of two dimensions. • The breath 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.

4. Literature Survey (1/2) • 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.

5. Literature Survey (2/2) • 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. 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.

6. Literature Comprehension(1/2) • The literature comprehension is the process of reading and understanding the research found in the survey process. Part of the comprehension process may require that experiments described in the research be replicated or implemented.

7. Literature Comprehension(2/2) • This will normally mean that your supervisor or other people will need to help. The process of reading and trying to understand complex research can sometimes be a discouraging one, but a systematic approach to tackling this is described in this section.

8. Literature Review (1/3) • The literature review is the process of consolidating the various strands of past research into a single narrative describing the evolution of the research domain.

9. Literature Review (2/3) • There are checklists provided to assist you in this task, one that deals with the evaluation of a research paper, and the other which deals with questions to reflect upon regarding the overall structure of the literature review chapter in a dissertation.

10. Literature Review (3/3) • The underlying (or hidden) theme of the narrative is to show that there is a ‘gap’ in the existing research and how your work will address this problem.

11. Literature Survey

12. Literature Survey: In detail • If you know the exact domain of your research (from the research proposal stage, and further clarified by the mini-dissertation and dissertation shell phases) 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.

13. Literature Survey: In detail • The technique is simple, 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.

14. 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 ?

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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"

18. 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.

19. 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

20. 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*"

21. acronyms pseudo-synonyms, or false synonyms single-concept principle hyponyms antonyms neologisms phraseologism PROBLEMS WITH USING A SEARCH ENGINE AS THE SOLE SOURCE OF INFORMATION quasi-synonyms, or near-synonyms hypernyms Cross- references collocation monosemy tautonyms synonyms polysemy abbreviations

22. 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*"

23. Example Synonym • Community of practice • Network of practice • Virtual community • Virtual Ethnography • Virtual team • Community-driven knowledge management

24. Literature Comprehension

25. Literature Comprehension • Active Reading • It is very important to read new research in an active manner, you shouldn’t just skim read the material, but understand what you are reading, as you are reading it. It may be necessary to re-read a sentence, one phrase at a time, or one word at a time until the meaning is evident. It may be the case that you will have to consult some reference source to confirm the meaning of terminology, this being the case, it is only logical to keep reference material close to hand (textbooks, the internet, dictionaries, etc.)

26. Literature Comprehension • A typical research paper (from a conference or journal) consists of the following parts; • Title, • Abstract, • Introduction, • Methodology, • Results and • Bibliography.

27. Literature Comprehension • When you encounter new terminology in the course of reading papers (which you invariably will), it is important that you note it down, and find out what it means. You can do this by looking it up on the web or in a textbook, if it is an acronym, synonym or a related term to your research topic, BUILD A LEXICON. This is a very important step, since any new term could be central to your research, it may describe a mathematical technique or it could be a synonym for the research domain itself, whatever the case.

28. Literature Comprehension • At the beginning of the research process you will be deluged with new terminology, the important thing is to hang in there, don’t get overwhelmed by it all, the more papers you read, the less new terms you will be encountering, the more of an expert you will become. As you are learning more about the papers it is very important that you update the records you are keeping about this particular paper, in particular, the research topic or keywords sections.

29. Papers • Title • Abstract • Introduction • Methodology • Results • Bibliography

30. Literature Review

31. Literature Review • The review itself is the final piece of the puzzle, it is a matter of tying together all the previous research that you have found and reviewed, and producing an artifact that is not just all those reviews put together, but a coherent and cohesive narrative of the research to date, and a narrative that points to a ‘gap’ in the research that your work intends to fill. It also contextualises the work in the broader research scope.

32. Literature Review • The first step in this process is to consider each article that you have reviewed, is it significant enough to go into the review ? How do you evaluate that ? The answer is simple ; does it help build towards the ‘gap’ in the research you are identifying ? or to put it another way, could you take this article out and it wouldn’t make any difference ? The articles should group together into research trends so you should list the articles by this grouping and see which ones are important.

33. Literature Review • Remember that writing is not necessarily a linear process, write what sections you know about, when you know about them. As with all of the writing that you will be doing for you dissertation, there will be many drafts of the literature review chapter, so it is best to overwrite it first and then you can cut down, therefore you should include many of the questions for each article in the first draft of your work and chip away at it a piece at a time.

34. Literature Review • The research should be seen as the zenith of the cumulative process of the scientific research that has already been done. Then the process becomes a matter of making these disparate stories into one single narrative, with one theme : there is something missing in the research to date that you are going to address.

35. Literature Review • The structure of the literature review will be the same as that of any document, it has a • beginning, • middle and • end.

36. Literature Review • The beginning or introduction will introduce the main research topics and the end or conclusion will be that there has been a great deal of work done in this area, but there is a gap in the work that your research will address.

37. Literature Review • The middle part of the literature review, can be presented in a number of way, depending on your personal preferences, the main research trends must be discussed, key researchers must be identified, and the work must spiral from it’s research beginnings towards the research gap that you are going to fill. This is the hurricane that we saw at the start of the chapter, the general research topics you discuss must lead logically to the specific research that you are undertaking.

38. Literature Review • It may be the case that the trends in the research in your domain fall into two opposing camps, the for-and-against type paradigm, This being the case, whichever side your work is on, make sure that you present the merits of each side, this gives your readers a balanced view of the domain, and gives them the impression of a researcher who can take a sophisticated perspective on matters.

39. Literature Review