literature review for computer science project

Computer Science

• Key resources
• Databases and journal articles
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What is a literature review?

Finding the gaps and advances in your area, literature review resources, annotated bibliography.

A literature review is a survey and critical analysis of what has been written on a particular topic, theory, question or method.

What is its purpose?

• justify your research
• provide context for your research
• ensure that the research has not been done before
• highlight flaws in previous research
• identify new ways, to interpret and highlight gaps in previous research
• signpost a way forward for further research
• show where your research fits into the existing literature
• Literature reviews guide The Literature reviews guide contains detailed information on the process of searching for and producing literature reviews.
• Scopus A multidisciplinary abstract and citation database of peer reviewed literature, book reviews and conference proceedings.
• Web of Science A collection of citation databases and citation analysis tools covering the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.
• IEEE Xplore digital library Provides full-text access to IEEE and IEE transactions, journals, magazines and conference proceedings published since 1988 and current IEEE Standards.
• ACM digital library publications Full text of every article published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and bibliographic citations from major publishers in computing
• Annual reviews online This database provides review journals from across the sciences, with articles that review significant primary research literature.
• Cited reference searching

Books and other resources for approaches and methods on doing a literature review. See the Literature reviews guide .

An annotated bibliography provides:

• a list of references presenting a brief summary of the main arguments or ideas of each resource.
• a critique or evaluation of the resource's usefulness, reliability, objectivity or bias
• a reflection on how the resource fits into your research.
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Computer Science and Engineering

• Getting Started
• Keeping Current

Introduction

Gather Your Tools

Determine the Project's Scope

Create the Search Strategy

Determine What Resources to Use

Search, read, refine, repeat.

Saved Searches, Alerts and Feeds

• STEM Biographies & Info
• Writing & Citing

This page focuses on how to do an in-depth literature review for a dissertation, thesis, grant application or lengthy term paper in electrical engineering.  

• For a more general description of what an in-depth literature review is and how it looks, see our guide on " Literature Reviews and Annotated Bibliographies " created by Ed Oetting, history and political science librarian.
• For lower-level engineering undergraduate students who are doing a short term paper, the " How to Research a Topic " page on the " Engineerng Basics" guide may be more applicable.

Library Account Is your library account clear of fines?   If not, you may not be allowed to check out more books nor renew books you already have.  All library notices are sent via email to your "asu.edu" address; if you prefer to receive email at a different address make sure you have forwarded your asu.edu correctly.  Also, make sure that your spam filter allows the library email to come through. 

Illiad (Interlibrary Loan) Account   If you don't already have an ILLiad account, please register for one.  Interlibrary loan services will get you material not available at the ASU Library and also scan or deliver materials from the libraries on the other ASU campuses.

Determine the Project's Scope.

Do you know what you are looking for?  Can you describe your project using one simple sentence or can you phrase the project as a question?  Without a clear idea of the project, you may not be able to determine which are the best resources to search, what terminology should be used in those resources, and if the results are appropriate and sufficient.    

If you're having difficulty getting your project described succinctly, try using a PICO chart to identify the concepts involved:

• P is the popluation, problem, predicament or process
• I is the intervention or improvement
• C is what you'll compare your intervention/improvment to, and
• O is the outcome (or results of the comparison of I and C ) 

For example: 

Your client, the owner of a nuclear power generating facility, has had several less than optimal safety inspections recently.  The inspectors have singled out operator error as a major concern and have required changes in employee training.  But is more training the solution?  The employees complain that the plant's poorly designed control room hampers their ability to respond to non-standard situations.  Could a redesign improve performance and decrease the occurance of unsafe events?   Your client wants more than just your opinion, he wants to see the data to back it up.   So, what can you find in the literature?

Here's one way that the PICO chart could be filled out:     

• P =   nuclear power safety  
• I  = human factors engineering
• C  =  additional training; little or no human factors engineering used  
• O = accident rate or safety inspection comparison

And here are examples of possible search statements:  

• I am looking for ways that human factors engineering can improve safety in the nuclear power industry.
• Is additional training or employing human factors engineering the better method for reducing safety violations in a nuclear power plant? 

Your research will always start with a " P AND I " search; those are the most important pieces of the puzzle.  However, once you have the results from that search, you'll need to know where you want to go with those results; that's when the C and O concepts need to be considered.  

 Also, don't forget --- determine if your project has limits.  For example:

• Are you reviewing the literature only within a specific time frame?
• Are you looking at English-language material only?
• Are you considering research from just the United States or worldwide?
• Are there types of material you won't be covering (trade magazines, patents, technical reports, etc.)?  

Take the simple sentence or question that describes what you are looking for.  What are the concepts in the sentence? Are there synonyms that describe the same concept?   If you filled out a PICO chart, concentrate on the  P (problem) and the  I (intervention) for the concept chart.  

Concept Chart:

Concept 1:   _______  OR _______  OR _______  AND Concept 2:   _______   OR   _______  OR   _______  AND Concept 3:  _______  OR  _______  OR   _______ 

  Example:  

I am looking for ways that human factors engineering can improve safety in the nuclear power industry. 

Concept 1:   nuclear power    OR _ nuclear industry _____   AND Concept 2:   _safety___  OR   _accident prevention____   AND Concept 3: _ human factors engineering ___   

What resources you'll use for your literature review depends on what types of materials you want to find.  

• Background Information The more you know about a topic, the better you'll be able to research it.  You'll be familiar with the terminology, understand the underlining science/technology and be aware of the issues in the field. Most importantly, you'll be able to understand what you've retrieved from your search.  But no matter how much you know before hand you'll likely run across terms and concepts with which you're unfamiliar.    Materials such as encyclopedias, dictionaries and handbooks will not only help you learn about the basics of your topic before you begin your search but they'll also help you understand the terminology used in the documents you found from your literature review.    You'll find these types of resources listed on the Dictionaries and Handbooks pages on this guide.
• Books The large size of books (usually 100-500 pages) allows a topic to be studied braodly, covering many different issues.  Conversely, the large size also allows for a specific aspect of the topic to be covered in great detail.  Because of the time it takes to publish, sci-tech books generally do not contain the most current information. To find print and online books from both the ASU Library as well as in other libraries, see the Books page on this guide.
• Conference Papers Scientists and engineers frequently present new findings at conferences before these findings are written up in journal articles or books.  Not every conference, however, publishes it proceedings.  In some cases, conferences publish only a few of the papers presented but not all.   Many resources that help you find journal articles, may also be used to find conference papers, see the Articles page on this guide.
• Journal and Trade Magazine Articles Articles in journals (also called magazines) are short, usually 5-20 pages in length and cover a specific finding, experiment or project.  Articles in scholary journals are usually written by academics or professional scientists/engineers and are aimed at others at the same level.   Articles in trade journals/magazines are written by the journal staff and report on industry news suchs as sales, mergers, prices, etc.   To find journal and trade magazine articles, use the resources listed on the Articles page on this guide. 
• Patents Patents are grants from governments that gives the inventor certain rights of manufacture.  Patents provide a wealth of information for how a technology is being advanced and by which companies.  It is frequently stated that 80% of the information in patents never appears elsewhere in the literature. 
• To identify patents granted in the U.S. and internationally see the " Searching for Patents " guide.
• To see statistical information for U.S. patents by technology class see the US Patent and Trademark's website.
• Technical Reports Technical reports are part of the "gray literature";  gray literature refers to documents that are not published commercially, hence they are difficult to both identify and find.  Technical reports focus on a specific experiment or research project and are meant to convey the results of the experiment or project back to the funding organization.  In the United States, common sources of technical reports are the government agencies that sponsor research projects.  Reports generated within a private corporation and funded soley by that corporation are seldom ever available to anyone outside of the company.      To find technical reports, use the resources listed on the Technical Reports page on this guide.     

Search, Read, Refine and Repeat

Now it's time to apply your search strategy in the resources you've decided to use.

• Use the Advanced Search feature (or whatever search is set up with the 3 lines of boxes) and enter your search strategy just as you recorded in your search strategy chart.  Don't forget to set your limits.   If the resource only provides a single search box, rearrange your chart from vertical into horizontal so that the search statement looks like this:   (Concept#1 OR synonym) AND (Concept#2 OR synonym) AND (Concept#3 OR synonym) Example: (nuclear power OR nuclear industry) AND (safety OR accident prevention) AND (human factors engineering)
• Examine the results to find the most appropriate items.  Keep your one-sentence project description (and/or your PICO chart) in mind to help you stay on track.
• Export the records/citations you want to keep into a citation manager.
• If there are subjects (may also be called subject headings, index terms, descriptors or controlled vocabulary) assigned to each item, make sure that those also transferred into a citation manager.  If not, add them manually.
• Get the full text of the items 
• Read the full text of the items and look at the subjects assigned to the item and consider:
• Do I have to change (narrow) my topic to something more specific because I'm finding way too much? 
• Do I have to change (broaden) my topic because I can't find enough about it? 
• Is there additional terminology for my topic/concepts that I hadn't included in my original search?
• Redo your search strategy according to what you found in step #6 and rerun the search in the resources again.
• You may need to repeat this cycle several times before you are able to identify the best terminology to use in each resource. 

If there will be several months in between when you search the literature and when you turn in the paper, consider setting up alerts and feeds so that you are notified should new items about your topic appear.   How you set up an alert or feed will vary.  In most cases you'll be required to set up a personal account or profile with the journal or database --- there is no charge for this but you will have to identify yourself and provide an email address.  

For instructions on setting up alerts and feeds, see the " Keep Current " page.

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• Last updated: Jan 2, 2024 8:27 AM
• URL: https://libguides.asu.edu/computerscience

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Literature Reviews

• How to Access Full Text
• Background: Books and Review Articles
• Articles, Conferences, More
• Google Scholar and Google Books
• Information Security
• LaTeX, MATLAB, Open Source, Overleaf, More
• Problems and Solutions
• Technical Reports
• Avoiding Plagiarism
• Citing Sources This link opens in a new window
• Copyright This link opens in a new window
• Evaluating Information This link opens in a new window
• RefWorks Guide and Help This link opens in a new window
• CAPSTONE HELP
• Organizing/Synthesizing
• Peer Review
• Ulrich's -- One More Way To Find Peer-reviewed Papers

"Literature review," "systematic literature review," "integrative literature review" -- these are terms used in different disciplines for basically the same thing -- a rigorous examination of the scholarly literature about a topic (at different levels of rigor, and with some different emphases).  

1. Our library's guide to Writing a Literature Review

2. Other helpful sites

• Writing Center at UNC (Chapel Hill) -- A very good guide about lit reviews and how to write them
• Literature Review: Synthesizing Multiple Sources (LSU, June 2011 but good; PDF) -- Planning, writing, and tips for revising your paper

3. Welch Library's list of the types of expert reviews

Doing a good job of organizing your information makes writing about it a lot easier.

You can organize your sources using a citation manager, such as refworks , or use a matrix (if you only have a few references):.

• Use Google Sheets, Word, Excel, or whatever you prefer to create a table
• The column headings should include the citation information, and the main points that you want to track, as shown

Synthesizing your information is not just summarizing it. Here are processes and examples about how to combine your sources into a good piece of writing:

• Purdue OWL's Synthesizing Sources
• Synthesizing Sources (California State University, Northridge)

Annotated Bibliography  

An "annotation" is a note or comment. An "annotated bibliography" is a "list of citations to books, articles, and [other items]. Each citation is followed by a brief...descriptive and evaluative paragraph, [whose purpose is] to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited."*

• Sage Research Methods (database) --> Empirical Research and Writing (ebook) -- Chapter 3: Doing Pre-research  
• Purdue's OWL (Online Writing Lab) includes definitions and samples of annotations  
• Cornell's guide * to writing annotated bibliographies  

* Thank you to Olin Library Reference, Research & Learning Services, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY, USA https://guides.library.cornell.edu/annotatedbibliography

What does "peer-reviewed" mean?

• If an article has been peer-reviewed before being published, it means that the article has been read by other people in the same field of study ("peers").
• The author's reviewers have commented on the article, not only noting typos and possible errors, but also giving a judgment about whether or not the article should be published by the journal to which it was submitted.

How do I find "peer-reviewed" materials?

• Most of the the research articles in scholarly journals are peer-reviewed.
• Many databases allow you to check a box that says "peer-reviewed," or to see which results in your list of results are from peer-reviewed sources. Some of the databases that provide this are Academic Search Ultimate, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Sociological Abstracts.

What kinds of materials are *not* peer-reviewed?

• open web pages
• most newspapers, newsletters, and news items in journals
• letters to the editor
• press releases
• columns and blogs
• book reviews
• anything in a popular magazine (e.g., Time, Newsweek, Glamour, Men's Health)

If a piece of information wasn't peer-reviewed, does that mean that I can't trust it at all?

No; sometimes you can. For example, the preprints submitted to well-known sites such as  arXiv  (mainly covering physics) and  CiteSeerX (mainly covering computer science) are probably trustworthy, as are the databases and web pages produced by entities such as the National Library of Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Cancer Society.

Is this paper peer-reviewed? Ulrichsweb will tell you.

1) On the library home page , choose "Articles and Databases" --> "Databases" --> Ulrichsweb

2) Put in the title of the JOURNAL (not the article), in quotation marks so all the words are next to each other

3) Mouse over the black icon, and you'll see that it means "refereed" (which means peer-reviewed, because it's been looked at by referees or reviewers). This journal is not peer-reviewed, because none of the formats have a black icon next to it:

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• Last Updated: Mar 26, 2024 1:56 PM
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• CAREER FEATURE
• 04 December 2020
• Correction 09 December 2020

How to write a superb literature review

Andy Tay is a freelance writer based in Singapore.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Literature reviews are important resources for scientists. They provide historical context for a field while offering opinions on its future trajectory. Creating them can provide inspiration for one’s own research, as well as some practice in writing. But few scientists are trained in how to write a review — or in what constitutes an excellent one. Even picking the appropriate software to use can be an involved decision (see ‘Tools and techniques’). So Nature asked editors and working scientists with well-cited reviews for their tips.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03422-x

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Updates & Corrections

Correction 09 December 2020 : An earlier version of the tables in this article included some incorrect details about the programs Zotero, Endnote and Manubot. These have now been corrected.

Hsing, I.-M., Xu, Y. & Zhao, W. Electroanalysis 19 , 755–768 (2007).

Article   Google Scholar  

Ledesma, H. A. et al. Nature Nanotechnol. 14 , 645–657 (2019).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Brahlek, M., Koirala, N., Bansal, N. & Oh, S. Solid State Commun. 215–216 , 54–62 (2015).

Choi, Y. & Lee, S. Y. Nature Rev. Chem . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-020-00221-w (2020).

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Computer Science: Systematic Reviews

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• Systematic Reviews

What Is a Systematic Review?

Regular literature reviews are simply summaries of the literature on a particular topic. A systematic review, however, is a comprehensive literature review conducted to answer a specific research question. Authors of a systematic review aim to find, code, appraise, and synthesize all of the previous research on their question in an unbiased and well-documented manner. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) outline the minimum amount of information that needs to be reported at the conclusion of a systematic review project. 

Other types of what are known as "evidence syntheses," such as scoping, rapid, and integrative reviews, have varying methodologies. While systematic reviews originated with and continue to be a popular publication type in medicine and other health sciences fields, more and more researchers in other disciplines are choosing to conduct evidence syntheses. 

This guide will walk you through the major steps of a systematic review and point you to key resources including Covidence, a systematic review project management tool. For help with systematic reviews and other major literature review projects, please send us an email at  [email protected] .

Getting Help with Reviews

Organization such as the Institute of Medicine recommend that you consult a librarian when conducting a systematic review. Librarians at the University of Nevada, Reno can help you:

• Understand best practices for conducting systematic reviews and other evidence syntheses in your discipline
• Choose and formulate a research question
• Decide which review type (e.g., systematic, scoping, rapid, etc.) is the best fit for your project
• Determine what to include and where to register a systematic review protocol
• Select search terms and develop a search strategy
• Identify databases and platforms to search
• Find the full text of articles and other sources
• Become familiar with free citation management (e.g., EndNote, Zotero)
• Get access to you and help using Covidence, a systematic review project management tool

Doing a Systematic Review

• Plan - This is the project planning stage. You and your team will need to develop a good research question, determine the type of review you will conduct (systematic, scoping, rapid, etc.), and establish the inclusion and exclusion criteria (e.g., you're only going to look at studies that use a certain methodology). All of this information needs to be included in your protocol. You'll also need to ensure that the project is viable - has someone already done a systematic review on this topic? Do some searches and check the various protocol registries to find out. 
• Identify - Next, a comprehensive search of the literature is undertaken to ensure all studies that meet the predetermined criteria are identified. Each research question is different, so the number and types of databases you'll search - as well as other online publication venues - will vary. Some standards and guidelines specify that certain databases (e.g., MEDLINE, EMBASE) should be searched regardless. Your subject librarian can help you select appropriate databases to search and develop search strings for each of those databases.  
• Evaluate - In this step, retrieved articles are screened and sorted using the predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The risk of bias for each included study is also assessed around this time. It's best if you import search results into a citation management tool (see below) to clean up the citations and remove any duplicates. You can then use a tool like Rayyan (see below) to screen the results. You should begin by screening titles and abstracts only, and then you'll examine the full text of any remaining articles. Each study should be reviewed by a minimum of two people on the project team. 
• Collect - Each included study is coded and the quantitative or qualitative data contained in these studies is then synthesized. You'll have to either find or develop a coding strategy or form that meets your needs. 
• Explain - The synthesized results are articulated and contextualized. What do the results mean? How have they answered your research question?
• Summarize - The final report provides a complete description of the methods and results in a clear, transparent fashion. 

Adapted from

Types of reviews, systematic review.

These types of studies employ a systematic method to analyze and synthesize the results of numerous studies. "Systematic" in this case means following a strict set of steps - as outlined by entities like PRISMA and the Institute of Medicine - so as to make the review more reproducible and less biased. Consistent, thorough documentation is also key. Reviews of this type are not meant to be conducted by an individual but rather a (small) team of researchers. Systematic reviews are widely used in the health sciences, often to find a generalized conclusion from multiple evidence-based studies. 

Meta-Analysis

A systematic method that uses statistics to analyze the data from numerous studies. The researchers combine the data from studies with similar data types and analyze them as a single, expanded dataset. Meta-analyses are a type of systematic review.

Scoping Review

A scoping review employs the systematic review methodology to explore a broader topic or question rather than a specific and answerable one, as is generally the case with a systematic review. Authors of these types of reviews seek to collect and categorize the existing literature so as to identify any gaps.

Rapid Review

Rapid reviews are systematic reviews conducted under a time constraint. Researchers make use of workarounds to complete the review quickly (e.g., only looking at English-language publications), which can lead to a less thorough and more biased review. 

Narrative Review

A traditional literature review that summarizes and synthesizes the findings of numerous original research articles. The purpose and scope of narrative literature reviews vary widely and do not follow a set protocol. Most literature reviews are narrative reviews. 

Umbrella Review

Umbrella reviews are, essentially, systematic reviews of systematic reviews. These compile evidence from multiple review studies into one usable document. 

Grant, Maria J., and Andrew Booth. “A Typology of Reviews: An Analysis of 14 Review Types and Associated Methodologies.” Health Information & Libraries Journal , vol. 26, no. 2, 2009, pp. 91-108. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-1842.2009.00848.x .

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Computer Science (UNH Durham): Literature Reviews

• Books & E-Books
• Find Articles
• Reference Shelf
• Literature Reviews

Technical Reports

• Tools & Tutorials

Bibliographic Management Software

Zotero is a free, open source bibliographic management tool that operates as an extension of the Firefox browser.   Zotero allows the collection of citations to any kind of material and automatically formats bibliographies in almost any style.  Zotero also has many search, tagging, and note taking features.  Visit the Zotero quick start guide to learn more. 

EndNote is offered through the Web of Science database.  It enables users to collect, organize, and format citations the Web of Science database and other ISI products and to input citations to any other outside matrials.  To register, go into the Web of Science database and click on "My EndNote Web" at the top of the screen.  Endnote accounts can be accessed from any computer at the institution or off-campus through Blackboard or VPN. 

• Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity Full text collection of reports, papers, and notes searchable by keyword or author. Includes a browsable keyword list.
• National Technical Information Service (NTIS) Collection of citations to reports on government funded research. If you need materials cited on the NTIS site please check WorldCat or talk to your librarian.
• Science.gov Allows searches across many government databases and websites. Content is not limited to technical reports. Often full text of reports is available.
• Virtual Technical Reports Center Links to hundreds of university, government, and project websites containing technical reports and other resources. more... less... Maintained by the University of Maryland Libraries.

Getting Started

The goal of a literature review is to find all the relevant publications on a topic and to then summarize and synthesize that information. A literature review can help you find areas where further research is needed, narrow a research topic, or determine if a thesis question is unique. Talk to your advisor for help defining your research question. For help with library resources, talk to your librarian; they can help you find a combination of resources that will result in a comprehensive search.

Indexes and Databases

• ACM Digital Library This link opens in a new window Provides access to ACM journals, newsletters, and conference proceedings. Includes bibliographic information, abstracts, reviews, and the full text for articles along with selected works published by affiliated organizations. Dates of coverage: 1947-current
• CiteSeerX Indexes computer and information science literature and includes full text of articles and citation statistics. Allows the full text of articles to be searched.
• IEEE Xplore This link opens in a new window A digital library providing full text access to the world's highest quality technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics. It contains full text documents from IEEE journals, transactions, magazines, letters, conference proceedings, standards, and IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) Conferences. UNH no longer has access to IET Journals.
• Web of Science This link opens in a new window Facilitates research-level interdisciplinary search. Use the Basic Search to locate articles in high-impact scholarly journals in science, social science, arts, and humanities. Use the unique Cited Reference search for articles that cite an article you already know of, so you can track citations forward in time.
• INSPEC This link opens in a new window The world's leading resource for coverage of research literature in physics, including astronomy and astrophysics. Its other subject strengths are electrical engineering; control, and computing, including information technology. International journals and conference proceedings are covered, with selected indexing of books and reports. This resource allows searching by specialized fields. Dates of coverage: 1896-current
• Computing Research Repository (CoRR) Archives computer science papers with some coverage back to 1993. Includes full text of all papers. Frequently updated. more... less... Sponsored by ACM, the arXiv.org e-Print archive, NCSTRL (Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library), and AAAI.
• DBLP Computer Science Bibliography Provides citations to articles in major computer science journals and conference proceedings and in some cases links to full-text versions of articles (look for the words "Electronic Editions.") Search by author or keyword, or browse by journal, conference proceeding, or broad subject area.

Finding Dissertations and Theses

• Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window Comprehensive collection of full-text dissertations and theses. Official digital dissertations archive for the Library of Congress and considered the database of record for graduate research. Note: Full text for certain publications is subject to market availability. Dates of coverage: 1861-current
• Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Searches almost 4 million dissertations and theses from around the world. To focus your search, try the "advanced search tips" and use the facets on the left when viewing your search results.
• OpenDOAR Allows searches of the contents of institutional repositories which may contain dissertations that are not available through the Digital Dissertations database. Repositories contents are not limited to dissertations; to limit your search add "dissertation" or "thesis" to your keywords in the search box.
• TEL (thèses-EN-ligne) Part of HAL , this database is a multidisciplinary collection of self-submitted theses and dissertations.

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• ACM Guide to Computing Literature by Association for Computing Machinery Call Number: Eng/Math/CS Library QA76 .A8 Index to books, papers, reports, articles in major journals of computing and related fields, conferences and symposia. Available online from 1985 to present at the ACM website. Available only in print from 1977 to 1984.
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Degree Projects in Computer Science

Literature review.

Senast ändrad 2017-04-20 02:22 av Johan Hagelbäck

What is a literature review?

All degree projects begin with a literature review. In this step, you search for and read relevant articles in your field of study. The purpose is:

• To give an overview of the “big issues” in a field of study
• To summarize other people’s work
• To evaluate other people’s work
• To provide a context for your work
• To identify gaps
• To develop an understanding of theories and methods used in the field of study

The articles you read are then summarized in your report. When summarizing an article, the following questions shall be answered:

• What were the aims and objectives?
• What were the outcomes of the work?
• What approaches/methods/strategy were used?
• In what context was the work conducted?
• What was its contribution to the field of study?
• What connection does it have to the problem I plan to investigate?

After conducting the literature review you have learned what is going on in the field of study. You will learn why the topic is important, who it is important for and how other people approached problems in the field (what methods they used). You will also find out what is different in your project compared to the work of others, and what contribution your project will have to the field of study. This helps you motivate why your project is interesting and define what is new and novel.

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• v.9(7); 2013 Jul

Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Marco pautasso.

1 Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), CNRS, Montpellier, France

2 Centre for Biodiversity Synthesis and Analysis (CESAB), FRB, Aix-en-Provence, France

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [1] . For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2] . Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3] . Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read [4] . For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way [5] .

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue [6] . However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.

Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills [7] . In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews as a PhD and postdoctoral student. Ideas and insights also come from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors.

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review [8] . The topic must at least be:

• interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary),
• an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it), and
• a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered [9] , but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you should also select a target audience. In many cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will automatically define an audience (e.g., computational biologists), but that same topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audience, start by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

• keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated [10] ),
• keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
• use a paper management system (e.g., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
• define early in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria can then be described in the review to help define its scope), and
• do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already have published a literature review ( Figure 1 ), if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your issue, my advice is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than research studies [33] .

• discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,
• trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately in the previous reviews, and
• incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the usual rules apply:

• be thorough,
• use different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
• look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers first, and only afterwards start writing the review, you will need a very good memory to remember who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the time you have read the literature you selected, you will already have a rough draft of the review.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11] , but you will have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank document. Be careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. It is important to be careful in noting the references already at this stage, so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your endeavour will save you time.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12] . A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13] , [14] . When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not just on the nature of the material found and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15] .

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, it is good advice to keep it focused 16 , 17 . Including material just for the sake of it can easily lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields [18] . If you are writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a broad audience. This square may be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not stamp collecting. A good review does not just summarize the literature, but discusses it critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [19] . After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

• the major achievements in the reviewed field,
• the main areas of debate, and
• the outstanding research questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are excellent at mapping what has been achieved, some others are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Like a well-baked cake, a good review has a number of telling features: it is worth the reader's time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. It also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. However, a general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards including information about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20] .

How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way to order and link the various sections of a review [21] . This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22] .

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way as research papers, and rightly so [23] . As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft one more time before submission, as a last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the form.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the absence of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a literature review can help identify where the consensus view stands in the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue [24] .

Rule 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their own work [25] ? Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic about what they have published, and thus risk giving too much importance to their own findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in the other direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then it should be possible to be objective in reviewing one's own relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this may be achieved by assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to different coauthors.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they have been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a major research gap an issue that has just been addressed in a series of papers in press (the same applies, of course, to older, overlooked studies (“sleeping beauties” [26] )). This implies that literature reviewers would do well to keep an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it can take months before these appear in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a certain point in time, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters after the review has been published, so that there may soon be the need for an updated review. But this is the nature of science [27] – [32] . I wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to M. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, M. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, M. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, G. Stancanelli, P. Weisberg, and X. Xu for insights and discussions, and to P. Bourne, T. Matoni, and D. Smith for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Funding Statement

This work was funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Centre for Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity data (CESAB), as part of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript.

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Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Title: maskcd: a remote sensing change detection network based on mask classification.

Abstract: Change detection (CD) from remote sensing (RS) images using deep learning has been widely investigated in the literature. It is typically regarded as a pixel-wise labeling task that aims to classify each pixel as changed or unchanged. Although per-pixel classification networks in encoder-decoder structures have shown dominance, they still suffer from imprecise boundaries and incomplete object delineation at various scenes. For high-resolution RS images, partly or totally changed objects are more worthy of attention rather than a single pixel. Therefore, we revisit the CD task from the mask prediction and classification perspective and propose MaskCD to detect changed areas by adaptively generating categorized masks from input image pairs. Specifically, it utilizes a cross-level change representation perceiver (CLCRP) to learn multiscale change-aware representations and capture spatiotemporal relations from encoded features by exploiting deformable multihead self-attention (DeformMHSA). Subsequently, a masked-attention-based detection transformers (MA-DETR) decoder is developed to accurately locate and identify changed objects based on masked attention and self-attention mechanisms. It reconstructs the desired changed objects by decoding the pixel-wise representations into learnable mask proposals and making final predictions from these candidates. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art models. Codes and pretrained models are available online ( this https URL ).

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Researchers perform critical literature review on fairness and AI in the labor market

by Leiden University

Carlotta Rigotti and Eduard Fosch-Villaronga have published a new article that offers an insightful and critical literature review on fairness and AI in the labor market as part of the BIAS project.

The ever-increasing adoption of AI technologies in the hiring landscape to enhance human resources efficiency raises questions about algorithmic decision-making's implications in employment, especially for job applicants, including those at higher risk of social discrimination.

Among other concepts, such as transparency and accountability, fairness has become crucial in AI recruitment debates due to the potential reproduction of bias and discrimination that can disproportionately affect certain vulnerable groups . However, the ideals and ambitions of fairness may signify different meanings to various stakeholders.

To fill this gap, Rigotti and Fosch-Villaronga worked on a European endeavor titled "Fairness, AI & Recruitment" published in the journal Computer Law & Security Review . This piece, part of the HE BIAS project, provides a critical literature review on the intersection of fairness and AI in the labor market .

Conceptualizing fairness is critical because it may provide a clear benchmark for evaluating and mitigating biases, ensuring that AI systems do not perpetuate existing imbalances and promote, in this case, equitable opportunities for all candidates in the job market.

Scoping literature review

To that end, Carlotta and Eduard conducted a scoping literature review on fairness in AI applications for recruitment and selection purposes, with special emphasis on its definition, categorization, and practical implementation.

They started by explaining how AI applications have been increasingly used in the hiring process, especially to increase the efficiency of the HR team. Then they moved to the limitations of this technological innovation, which is known to be at high risk of privacy violations and social discrimination.

Against this backdrop, Carlotta and Eduard focused on defining and operationalizing fairness in AI applications for recruitment and selection purposes through cross-disciplinary lenses. Although the applicable legal frameworks and some research currently address the issue piecemeal, they observe and welcome the emergence of some cross-disciplinary efforts aimed at tackling this multifaceted challenge.

They conclude the article with some brief recommendations to guide and shape future research and action on the fairness of AI applications in the hiring process for the better.

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