Literature review

RESEARCH METHOD FOR ACADEMIC PROJECT I

A description of the literature relevant to a

particular field or topic. It gives an overview of what has been said,

who the key writers are, what are the prevailing theories and hypotheses, what questions are being asked, and what methods and methodologies are appropriate and useful.

What is a literature review?

Literature Review

is a very important chapter to show that you have studied what others have done and the research gap that will be the focus of your project.

describes what others have done and hence sets a benchmark for the current project.

provides a solid background for a research paper's investigation. Comprehensive knowledge of the literature of the field is essential to most research papers.

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.

The contents of this chapter mostly based on published material include books, journal articles, internet (electronic journals), newspapers, magazines, theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, reports, and documentaries.

In the context of a research paper on a

thesis, the literature review provides a background to the study being proposed.

The background may consider one or more of the following aspects depending on the research question being posed: Theoretical background – past, present or future Methodology and/or research methods Previous works/findings Rationale and/or relevance of the current study

The whole process of reviewing includes:

a. Searching for literatureb. Sorting and prioritising the retrieved literaturec. Analytical reading of papersd. Evaluative reading of paperse. Comparison across studiesf. Organising the contentg. Writing the review

The literature review needs to be relevant and

focused. It is impossible to cover all that have been

written within the field. Hence, it is important to be selective in the

works that we cite. Only papers that are directly relevant to our

topic need to be included in the LR.

Key features of a literature review

The literature review should be up to date.

Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible.

The literature review needs to be critical.

When writing a literature review, keep in mind that you are reviewing the literature, not summarizing it.

For example, if Smith (1978) conducted a study which found that squirrels preferred pecans to acorns, you want to say something like the following:

  Smith (1978) found that squirrels preferred pecans to acorns.

You do not want to do this:Smith (1978) conducted a 3x3x3 factorial design to study squirrels. He concentrated on brown squirrels, stating “flying squirrels are just too damn unpredictable to study” (page 54). 1000 squirrels were broken into six groups and given the choice of nuts to eat. 1 group was given nothing but pecans, the other nothing but acorns, and then allowed to switch, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH......

The research gap should arise from the literature review.

From the analysis of the literature, it should have become apparent that there are certain limitation in previous research or certain areas that have not yet been studied fully.

When you have finished your review, you need to state what is missing from the previous studies to explain what your study intends to do to fill the gap.

Besides a report through a narrative, a chart indicating the authors of the studies, the findings of the studies, and where the authors fall in all of this could be helpful as well.

Example:

Method used Assessment

Criteria

Feedback

Summary Street LSA Content Content coverage, length,

redundancy, relevancy and

plagiarism.

LEA LSA

NLP tools

(lemmatiser, spell

checker)

Content / style Coherence, content

coverage, cohesion,

language and adequacy.

Summary

Assessment System

Ensemble approach

using LSA and n-

gram

Content Content coverage.

Table 2.3 Differences between tools in summarization assessment

A ‘good’ literature review…..

….. is a synthesis of available research ….. is a critical evaluation ….. has appropriate breadth and depth ….. has clarity and conciseness ….. uses rigorous and consistent methods

A ‘poor’ literature review is…..

…..an annotated bibliography ….. confined to description ….. narrow and shallow ….. confusing and longwinded ….. constructed in an arbitrary way

The following example is taken from a paper which addressed the following topic: LEA: A Summarization Web Environment Based on Human Instructors’ Behaviour.

Sample of a literature review

2. Related Work

Thus far, there are two main approaches to assessing summaries automatically: learner summary assessment, e.g. SS, Summary Street [6] and automatic summarization evaluation, e.g. SEE, Summary Evaluation Environment [7].

Summary Street [6], is a summary assessment tool to train learners in summarisation abilities. It is focused on human evaluation and provides global scores and learner focused feedback on coherence, cohesion and reiteration. It provides measures on: spelling, summary length, overall score, section coverage, etc. The system is created to give immediate feedback on summaries and it is mainly thought for children.

SEE [7], is a summary evaluation system that provides scores in grammaticality, coherence and cohesion. The smallest unit of evaluation is the sentence. Evaluation metrics are calculated in terms of recall, coverage, retention and weighted retention and precision and pseudo precision. SEE is mainly focused on the evaluation of precision of automatically generated summaries in NLP context.