Author: | Stephen J. Turnbull |
---|---|
Organization: | Faculty of Engineering, Information, and Systems at the University of Tsukuba |
Contact: | Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> |
Date: | November 28, 2019 |
Copyright: | 2019, Stephen J. Turnbull |
Topic: | Research |
Writing a literature survey is an art. A well-written survey helps to convince your audience of you competence and that you deserve their attention. (This is mostly for an audience of readers -- it's hard to do a good survey in the amount of time generally allocated for an oral presentation).
Purposes of literature review (also, literature survey):
The purpose of comparison is clear I think (but feel free to ask questions!). Breadth and depth are more complicated.
Reading for your literature review should help prepare you for the following topics:
Depth means being able to trace your research agenda to its "roots", for each of the topics in "Breadth". By "agenda" I mean a line of development, a series of related research questions that build on each other, and are developed in a collection of research papers that (usually) cite each other.
The root of a research agenda is usually the "textbook treatment" of the area.
You may, but don't necessarily need to, cite an actual textbook. For the master level, it's generally a good idea. Doctoral dissertations usually trace development of their research area back to seminal papers preceding the textbooks, and so often do not mention textbooks.
The agenda itself is frequently generated by a "seminal paper" which makes a clear break from the textbook treatment, for the purpose of this research area.
Seminal papers can usually be recognized as the target of a cluster of citations, and by the fact that in a series where Paper A cites Paper B which cites Paper C, all of them cite Paper 0 (the seminal paper).
Other papers you should cite are those with clarify the agenda or generate research questions whose answers are needed to define your own research question. Some of these may also be seminal.
Typically you will take an historical perspective on the literature survey, and so generally will cover each topic a, b, c, d, e in that order. Then each topic generally is treated in the order 1, 2, 3 above.
Note that although typically a single popular textbook will cover all of the topics a - e in "Breadth", it is rare that any single paper will serve to define a stage in the research agenda for all of them. It's also rare that you need to cite completely different sets of papers for each topic in "Breadth", because methodological and analytical innovations are frequently driven by the need to address new data or research questions.