Computational Research

Methodology
Lecture No. 6

LITERATURE REVIEW

What is Literature Review?

A literature review discusses published
information in a particular subject area,
and sometimes information in a
particular subject area within a certain
time period.
A literature review can be just a simple
summary of the sources, but it usually
has an organizational pattern and
combines both summary and

synthesis.

Literature Review

What is Literature Review?

A summary is a recap of the important

information of the source, but a synthesis is a
re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that
information.
It might give a new interpretation of old
material or combine new with old
interpretations.
And depending on the situation, the literature
review may evaluate the sources and advise
the reader on the most pertinent or relevant.

Literature Review

What is Literature Review?

The format of a review of literature may vary

from discipline to discipline and from assignment
to assignment.
A review may be a self-contained unit or a
preface to and rationale for engaging in primary
research. A review is a required part of grant
and research proposals and often a chapter in
theses and dissertations.
Generally, the purpose of a review is to analyze
critically a segment of a published body of
knowledge through summary, classification, and
comparison of prior research studies and
theoretical articles.
Literature Review

What is Literature Review?

A literature review is the effective evaluation

of selected documents on a research topic.
A review may form an essential part of the
research process or may constitute a
research project in itself.
In the context of a research paper or thesis
the literature review is a critical synthesis of
previous research.
The evaluation of the literature leads
logically to the research question.
Literature Review

Why write Literature Review?

Literature reviews provide you with a handy

guide to a particular topic. If you have
limited time to conduct research, literature
reviews can give you an overview or act as
a stepping stone.
Literature reviews also provide a solid
background for a research paper's
investigation. Comprehensive knowledge of
the literature of the field is essential to
most research papers.
Literature Review

Why write Literature Review?

For professional, they are useful
reports that keep them up to date
with what is current in the field.
For scholars, the depth and breadth
of the literature review emphasizes
the credibility of the writer in his or
her field

Literature Review

Why write Literature Review?

The purpose of a literature review is for you

to take a critical look at the literature (facts
and views) that already exists in the area
you are researching.
A literature review is not a shopping list of
everything that exists, but a critical
analysis that shows an evaluation of the
existing literature and a relationship
between the different works.

Literature Review

Why write Literature Review?

Literature can include books, journal

articles, internet (electronic journals),
newspapers, magazines, theses and
dissertations, conference proceedings,
reports, and documentaries.
Literature reviews are written occasionally
in the humanities, but mostly in the
sciences and social sciences; in experiment
and lab reports, they constitute a section of
the paper.
Sometimes a literature review is written as
a paper in itself.
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10

Why write Literature Review?

In a broader context, Hart (1998) lists the

following purposes of a review:

Distinguishing what has been done from what

needs to be done;
Discovering important variables relevant to the
topic;
Synthesizing and gaining a new perspective;
Identifying relationships between ideas and
practice;
Establishing the context of the topic or problem;
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Why write Literature Review?

Rationalizing the significance of the

problem;
Enhancing and acquiring the subject
vocabulary;
Understanding the structure of the subject;
Relating ideas and theory to applications;
Identifying methodologies and techniques
that have been used
Showing familiarity with state-of-the-art
developments.
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?

Clarify

Roughly how many sources should you include?

What types of sources (books, journal articles,
websites)?
Should you summarize, synthesize, or critique
your sources by discussing a common theme or
issue?
Should you evaluate your sources?
Should you provide subheadings and other
background information, such as definitions
and/or a history?
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?

Find models

Look for other literature reviews in your area of

interest or in the discipline and read them to get
a sense of the types of themes you might want
to look for in your own research or ways to
organize your final review.
You can simply put the word "review" in your
search engine along with your other topic terms
to find articles of this type on the Internet or in
an electronic database.
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?
Narrow your topic
There are hundreds or even thousands of
articles and books on most areas of
study. The narrower your topic, the
easier it will be to limit the number of
sources you need to read in order to get
a good survey of the material.
Your instructor will probably not expect
you to read everything that's out there
on the topic, but you'll make your job
easier if you first limit your scope.
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?
Consider whether your sources
are current
Some disciplines require that you use
information that is as current as
possible. In the sciences, for instance,
treatments for medical problems are
constantly changing according to the
latest studies. Information even two
years old could be obsolete.
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?

However, if you are writing a review in the

humanities, history, or social sciences, a survey
of the history of the literature may be what is
needed, because what is important is how
perspectives have changed through the years or
within a certain time period.
Try sorting through some other current
bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to
get a sense of what your discipline expects.
You can also use this method to consider what is
"hot" and what is not.
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?
Find a focus
A literature review, like a term paper, is
usually organized around ideas, not the
sources themselves as an annotated
bibliography would be organized. This
means that you will not just simply list
your sources and go into detail about
each one of them, one at a time.

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What should I do before writing the

literature review?
Construct a working thesis
statement
Then use the focus you've found to
construct a thesis statement. Yes!
Literature reviews have thesis statements
as well!
Thesis statement introduces the reader to
the purpose of the document and outline
the major topics that will be covered to
achieve that purpose.
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?
Some sample thesis statements for
literature reviews are as follows:
The current trend in treatment for
congestive heart failure combines surgery
and medicine.
An analysis of the college admission
process reveals one challenge facing
counselors: accepting students with high
test scores or students with strong
extracurricular backgrounds.
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20

What should I do before writing the

literature review?
Consider organization
You've got a focus, and you've narrowed
it down to a thesis statement.
Now what is the most effective way of
presenting the information?
What are the most important topics,
subtopics, etc., that your review needs
to include?
And in what order should you present
them?
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?

Develop an organization for your review

First, cover the basic categories

Just like most academic papers, literature

reviews also must contain at least three basic
elements: an introduction or background
information section; the body of the review
containing the discussion of sources; and,
finally, a conclusion and/or recommendations
section to end the paper.

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What should I do before writing the

literature review?

Introduction: Gives a quick idea of the topic

of the literature review, such as the central
theme.
Body: Contains your discussion of sources
and is organized either chronologically,
thematically, or methodologically (see
below for more information on each).
Conclusions/Recommendations: Discuss
what you have drawn from reviewing
literature so far.
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?

Organizing the body

Once you have the basic categories in place, then
you must consider how you will present the sources
themselves within the body of your paper. Create an
organizational method to focus this section even
further.
To help you come up with an overall organizational
framework for your review, consider the six typical
ways of organizing the sources into a review:

Chronological
By publication
By trend
Thematic
Methodological
Questions for Further Research
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What should I do before writing the

literature review?

Similar to primary research, development of

the literature review requires four stages:
Problem formulationwhich topic or field is
being examined and what are its component
issues?
Literature searchfinding materials relevant
to the subject being explored
Data evaluationdetermining which literature
makes a significant contribution to the
understanding of the topic
Analysis and interpretationdiscussing the
findings and conclusions of pertinent literature
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What should you write?

the accepted facts in the area

the popular opinion
the main variables
the relationship between concepts and
variables
shortcomings in the existing findings
limitations in the methods used in the
existing findings
the relevance of your research
suggestions for further research in the
area.
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What should you write?

Literature reviews should comprise the following

elements:
An overview of the subject, issue or theory under
consideration, along with the objectives of the
literature review
Division of works under review into categories (e.g.
those in support of a particular position and those
against a particular position)
Explanation of how each work is similar to and how it
varies from the others
Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in
their argument, are most convincing of their
opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the
understanding and development of their area of
research
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What should you write?

Layout
Make your literature review have an academic and
professional appearance. Here are some points to
make the look of your report appealing to the reader
White space: leave space between sections,
especially from the abstract. This gives an uncluttered
effect.
Headings/sub-headings: these help to separate
ideas.
Text boxes: you can use these for quotations or
paraphrasing to separate them from the rest of your
text. It is also pleasing to the eye.

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What should you write?

Graphics: centre your graphics, such as

diagrams or tables, to have space around
them. Try not to bury graphics in your text.
Pagination: you can number pages or
sections or both, but the important thing to
do is to be consistent. The cover page
normally is not numbered. The content
page and abstract page usually have a
separate numbering system to the body of
your literature review.
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What should you write?

Language focus

Avoid too much direct quoting. The verb tense

chosen depends on your emphasis:
When you are citing a specific author's findings,
use the past tense: (found, demonstrated);
When you are writing about an accepted fact,
use the present tense: (demonstrates, finds);
and
When you are citing several authors or making a
general statement, use the present perfect
tense: (have shown, have found, little research
has been done).
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What should you write?

Final checklist

Have I fulfilled the purpose of the literature review?

Is it written at a level appropriate to its audience?
Are its facts correct?
Is all the information included relevant?
Are the layout and presentation easy on the eye?
Is the language clear, concise and academic?
Does the abstract summarise the entire review?
Does the introduction adequately introduce the topic?
Is the body organised logically?
Does the conclusion interpret, analyse and evaluate?
Are the recommendations reasonable?
Does the table of contents correspond with the actual contents?
Are page numbers correct?
Have I acknowledged all sources of information through correct
referencing?
Have I checked spelling, grammar and punctuation?
Have I carefully proof-read the final draft?
Literature Review

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How to review?
The whole process of reviewing
includes:
a. Searching for literature
b. Sorting and prioritising the retrieved
literature
c. Analytical reading of papers
d. Evaluative reading of papers
e. Comparison across studies
f. Organising the content
g. Writing the review
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How to review?

Comparison across studies

The aim is to extract key points by comparing

and contrasting ACROSS studies, instead of
reading one paper after another.
Key points for a review may concern areas of
similarities and/or differences in:

Research aim(s) or hypotheses

Research design and sampling
Instruments and procedures used
How data were analyzed
Results or findings
Interpretations

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How to review?

Tips on writing

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Example
Early works have addressed some of the problems and
issues discussed in video retrieval. Researchers have
developed ideas and tools for supporting video editing,
for example in [8]. They have defined a seamless
video editing in the gradient domain. The spatiotemporal gradient fields of target videos are modified
or mixed to generate a new gradient field, which is
usually not integrate able. They have also described
how semantic information about video can be
structured and used for content-based access. From a
general video archive point of view, the problem with
this tool is the lack of support for managing video
document structures. A digital video archive serving
different categories of users should offer a more
structured way of describing video contents
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Example
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are statistical tools that have
been used successfully in modelling difficult tasks such as
speech recognition [15] or biological sequence analysis [16].
Inspired by a similar speech application, Hidden Markov
model (HMM) has also been applied to activity recognition.
The first approach for the human movements based on
HMMs was described in [13]. It distinguished between six
different tennis strokes. This system divided the image into
meshes and counted the number of pixels representing the
person for each mesh. The numbers were composed to a
feature vector that was converted into a discrete label by a
vector quantizer. The labels were classified based on discrete
HMMs. In [8], an HMM is used as a representation of simple
actions which are recognized by computing the probability
that the model produces the visual observation sequence. In
[14] layered HMMs were proposed to model single person
office activities at various time granularities
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Example
Most of the existing work relies on using only a single
source of information (example, either audio or visual track
data alone). In [4], the average video shot activity and the
duration are used as features for the categorization of
movies according to the actions. An action scene was
characterized by temporally localized properties of video
shots which have little or no recurring similar visual
contents [5]. Although these visual characters are
undoubtedly good indicators of rapidly evolving action
contents, they are not enough to determine the desired
action. On the other hand, audio-based action detection was
independently performed on the sound track in [6].
However, this audio alone method may lead to many
potential false detected cases because many sounds often
mix different noises and other similar background sound.

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Assignment
Submit the review of an other paper related to
your old topic , not more than two pages in soft
and as well as in hard copy for assigning the
points.

http://www.iupui.edu/~uwc/pdf/Literature%20Review%20and%20Synth
esis.pdf
http://www.ncsu.edu/tutorial_center/writespeak/download/Synthesis.pd
f

Make a good presentation on

Literature Review: Synthesizing Multiple
Sources
Literature Review

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