Overview of Literature Survey

Summary

In this video, the speaker offers a comprehensive overview of the literature survey process in research, emphasizing its critical role beyond just "Googling." The session is broken into three modules, each roughly 20 minutes long, focusing on understanding the background of a literature survey, demonstrating literature sources, and organizing such data into documented formats. A literature survey involves searching authoritative, technical literature from sources like Google Scholar rather than general search engines. The module also covers important considerations, like avoiding duplication, understanding context and novelty in research, and utilizing tools and resources for effective literature searches, including institutional subscriptions, databases, and reference management software.

Highlights

• Literature surveys are essential for academic research and help in understanding previous work to build upon it effectively. 🔍
• Avoiding duplication in research by thoroughly surveying existing literature is vital for originality. 🔄
• The module demonstrates effective strategies to access and organize literature using available tools and resources. 🎯
• Key terminologies like DOI, ISBN, and impact factors are explained to aid in document tracking and validation. 📑
• The video introduces reference management software, highlighting JabRef as an open-source tool, to assist in organizing citations. 🛡️

Key Takeaways

• Literature surveys go beyond basic online searches; they're about diving into authoritative, technical sources like Google Scholar 📚.
• Understanding the background and importance of literature surveys is crucial for avoiding research duplication and establishing the context of your work. 💡
• Various tools and resources like institutional subscriptions, and databases help streamline the literature collection process. 🛠️
• Recognizing key terminologies such as DOI, ISBN, and impact factors is vital for effective research documentation. 🏷️
• Using reference management tools like JabRef can ease the process of organizing and citing gathered research articles. 🔖

Overview

In this engaging introduction to literature surveys, you'll learn why a Google search isn't enough for academic research. The module breaks down the process into manageable steps and emphasizes the importance of using authoritative sources like Google Scholar to truly understand existing scientific literature.

The session also delves into the importance of literature surveys at all stages of research, especially to avoid overlapping efforts. Key tools and resources, such as university subscriptions and open-access materials, are explained to help streamline your search and ensure you're seeing the full picture.

Finally, get hands-on tips for organizing your findings. The tutorial introduces effective strategies for managing references and citations, with a spotlight on using Reference Management Software like JabRef to make your research documentation both efficient and professional.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Literature Survey The chapter introduces the concept of a literature survey, outlining it as a multi-module presentation. The first module, approximately 20 minutes long, focuses on the foundational aspects of conducting a literature survey. Subsequent modules will delve deeper into the topic, each designed to further expand on the initial insights through detailed discussions and analyses.
• 01:00 - 03:30: Purpose of Literature Survey The chapter on 'Purpose of Literature Survey' provides a comprehensive guide on conducting a literature survey. It covers the entire process from finding literature sources, to organizing them using various tools, and ultimately integrating these sources into a document. A key point made is that conducting a literature survey goes beyond simple Google searches, indicating the need for a more structured and methodical approach.
• 03:30 - 08:00: Sources of Literature This chapter focuses on understanding the sources of literature, emphasizing the importance of conducting a comprehensive survey of technical literature. It distinguishes between general web searches and authoritative scientific research, highlighting platforms like Google Scholar as more aligned with academic literature surveys.
• 13:00 - 17:00: Strategies for Literature Search The chapter 'Strategies for Literature Search' provides an overview of the literature survey process, starting with a brief explanation of its importance. It explains the various sources from which literature can be sourced and the methods for conducting literature searches. The chapter also identifies key publishers of scientific archival literature widely used by the global scientific community. Finally, it offers guidance on collecting and storing literature effectively for future use.
• 17:00 - 19:00: Information Sources and Publishers This chapter discusses the importance of conducting a literature survey in scientific research. It highlights the necessity for every scientist to build on existing knowledge rather than starting from scratch. The chapter emphasizes understanding the approaches others have used, identifying gaps in existing research, and determining areas for personal contribution.
• 19:00 - 21:30: Using Reference Managers In this chapter, the necessity of conducting a literature survey is emphasized in order to distinguish between novel and familiar techniques in research. The text highlights that using a novel technique in a well-known area or applying a familiar technique in a new area can both contribute significant value to the literature. Understanding the concepts of novelty and familiarity requires knowledge of the existing body of work, thereby underscoring the importance of a thorough literature survey.

Overview of Literature Survey Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 we are going to look at literature survey in the next three modules each compressing roughly about 20 minutes the first 20 minutes is going to be slides on the background of literature survey and then the next 20 minutes roughly will be on
• 00:30 - 01:00 actual demonstration of the various literature sources i am going to show you how you can search for literature organize them in a set of tools that you can use and then in the last 20 minutes i will see how you can use this literature data in a document that you want to write up so we will start off the literature survey by first making a disclaimer literature survey is not just googling for some information the reason is google search engine
• 01:00 - 01:30 is going to look at the private websites of various individuals whereas by literature survey what we basically mean is a survey of technical literature that is of authoritative in nature pertaining to the scientific enterprise that is going on across the world in universities research labs and so on so what comes closest to envelop what is available in google would be perhaps the google scholar so please note that literature survey is not the same as googling out the
• 01:30 - 02:00 information so we are going to look at the literature survey in this manner first a very brief background on why should we get into this literature survey at all and then where are the sources of literature that we could look up what are the ways by which we can go about searching and then who are all the publishers who host the scientific archival literature that is being used by scientists all over the world and then towards the end how to collect and store it in a manner that we can use it
• 02:00 - 02:30 to write up a document ok so why do we want to do a literature survey at all so essentially the first requirement that we need to do is every scientist cannot replicate the entire history of how a particular topic has evolved so we must use approaches that are going beyond what others have done till now which means that we must know what others have used what kind of approaches people have used where are the gaps that have come up and where is it that we can contribute and then what is the
• 02:30 - 03:00 difference that we are making to the existing knowledge and very often a very novel technique used in a very familiarized area would be a good addition to the literature and sometimes a very familiar technique used in a totally novel area of research would also be valuable so novelty and familiarity as well as familiarity and novelty require you to know what is familiar and what is novel and therefore literature survey is necessary for you to know that and then very often
• 03:00 - 03:30 a study is valuable or seen as valuable by our peers when we are able to place that study in a current context where people look at it as valuable so it is important to avoid duplication and it is also important to clarify certain controversial results that may be coming up and if you want to know what is the state of the art in the literature that is currently there and we want to extend and build on the work of others definitely we need to know what is done till now and literacy survey should help
• 03:30 - 04:00 us in getting that status quo of the subject we are trying to do research on so literature survey that way is a very important aspect it should be done not only at the beginning of the research but also throughout but at the beginning it definitely makes a very important point literacy survey in the context of making a phd thesis or a research based degree is important because very often the research degrees are given based upon original work that is done by the student
• 04:00 - 04:30 and duplication is not acceptable even if it is not intentional so it is important to know what is out there what have people done elsewhere in the world on the research area that we are working on and sometimes it is also important to establish the context for your work and it is not so important to have a background knowledge of the topic that we are working on ok and to also point out anomalies and gaps we must know what has been done till now so in the context of a research thesis also
• 04:30 - 05:00 research analysis and literature survey is very important so where do we look up this literature so very often we have various ways and i am going to look at them in one by one the first way is obviously what is available for everyone in the world open access unfortunately the cost of keeping a journal publication or a conference proceeding in an archival
• 05:00 - 05:30 manner that is available in a reproducible manner over a long period of time he is going to make the respective publishers spend money for that so which means that there is a subscription cost associated with every journal access and therefore open access that is publicly available information from scientific archival data is very limited but definitely they are increasing in number as we go along so open access is
• 05:30 - 06:00 very much available and we will see what kind of journals are available under open access and in india there is a arrangement made by the ministry of human resources development under the so called indust program which is being coordinated by iit delhi which provides access to a large number of literature sources to various educational institutes in the country they are categorized into various groups tier 1 tier 2 tier 3 etcetera and which means that if your
• 06:00 - 06:30 research organization or university is funded by government then most probably quite a few of literature survey can be done using the sources that are paid for by indus program we will see what are all available on industry for our institute and then we also can see what is available in other institutes where we could perhaps go visit take permission and do the literature survey there ah very often the literature sources that are
• 06:30 - 07:00 subscribed by indexed are not adequate so some libraries do spend additional amount of money to make subscriptions beyond that set and this is something that will be available from your library so you definitely must get in touch with your librarian and find out what all the journals that are subscribed by your library and of late there has been also an effort to use some of the possibilities of authors being allowed to share their own
• 07:00 - 07:30 publications on a portal where upon request it is possible to have the literature shared so these are called as peer sharing sources so research gate and academia.edu are such peer sharing sources which also may be able to provide some amount of literature so what are these literature sources that we are talking about we are basically going to look at periodicals research reports conference proceedings
• 07:30 - 08:00 official publication standards thesis discussions etcetera sometimes even publications that are going to come up in future can also act as a source of literature we must of course have a pointer to refer to them so that whenever their complete bibliographic details are available we will be able to update them in our document and there are also secondary sources of literature such as compilations of works done and reviews reference books handbooks etcetera text books monographs
• 08:00 - 08:30 and abstracting services all these can be also acting as literature services and tertiary sources like dictionaries year books bibliographics lists of secondary sources also can be used as sources of literature so when we go ahead with literature survey we must be familiar with some terminology every book that we want to refer to must contain what is called an isbn number international standard book number this number is basically going to allow anybody in the world to identify
• 08:30 - 09:00 the book and also possibly source it if it is available in print any book that does not have an isbn is essentially not traceable after some time and it is important to note it down whenever we want to refer a book similarly any journal that we want to refer to should have an issn number and these are also applicable for newspapers and issn number is going to be in ranges we must pay attention to this when we are also
• 09:00 - 09:30 referring to conference proceedings which will usually have an issn number and today in the digital world we would like to have an identity for each document such that we will be able to access them directly and such an initiative is now available and the number is going by a name called digital object identifier namely the doi number so every document that is available online in the literature open literature will have a
• 09:30 - 10:00 doi number and there is an agency which translates the doi number into a url where that particular full text resource is available and whenever the full text resource moves the mapping will be modified by the agency dy agency and therefore we will be able to access the resource as the resource keeps moving its actual location and that means that if you are going to refer to an online resource make sure
• 10:00 - 10:30 that you have a dui number for the particular resource so that you can refer to it by that number and of course there are also other things that we must be familiar there is something called udc catalog this is basically to physically be able to refer to that book in a library and the format of a bibliographic information comes in several methods and two such formats are very popular ris format and bib format we will look into the format of these two
• 10:30 - 11:00 types of specification and what kind of fields are available etcetera as we collect literature survey through the demonstration that i will do briefly later on and there are also some other things that we must be aware of while doing literacy survey one such thing is journal impact factor what we mean by general impact factor is that to see how many times the articles in a particular journal are being referred by other journals and other articles it basically gives you a sense of how often these
• 11:00 - 11:30 articles are being read and being used by other scientists so if you want to compare two journals in a particular area then the one with a higher impact factor is being accessed read and referred more often and this is a number which is controversial one cannot compare these impact factors across research areas very often it is seen that a research area in which the
• 11:30 - 12:00 research is very actively being pursued there is a large number of researchers that are working then normally it will have journal impact factors a little bit on the higher side and in communities research communities where the the number of journals are limited the number of scientists are limited then the general impact factor tends to be on the lower side so it is not an absolute method by which we can say a journal is lesser more important but it gives you a relative sense
• 12:00 - 12:30 to compare two journals in a particular area of research there is also something called citation index this is about a journal article how many times has it been cited we do call some articles as citation classics what we mean by that is there is an article that has been referred by so many people may be hundreds that you could now call it as a classic and citation is basically how many times it has been referred by other successful journal publications hash index is something again a controversial index it
• 12:30 - 13:00 basically refers to how many times a particular authors publications have been cited and how many of them exceed the number of publications that is basically when we say that an author has an h index of say n then he has n papers that are cited n times or more so which also means that an author who has a higher edge index is an author whose papers are being read widely and are being referred widely and
• 13:00 - 13:30 most probably he is a more successful scientist so what are the various strategies to search literature it is very important for a newbie in research to be very effective in searching the literature in his or her area because the amount of time available to come to the focus area is very limited and we must identify the gaps very quickly so that we can focus on the research that we want to pursue so there are three major strategies that we can
• 13:30 - 14:00 use to search literature the first strategy is basically using a keyword what we mean by a keyword search is using a word to identify but the topic of the research results that we are looking for are to use the author's name we could also use a keyword that is mentioned by the article itself so essentially it is like coming up with words that would describe and identify a particular
• 14:00 - 14:30 research paper and which means that there are variants that may be available that point to the same article we will see how we can do that shortly there is also two other ways of searching what is called the backward chronological search and a forward chronological search what we mean by these two will be evident as we do the searching ah when we go ahead with a domain demonstration citation is something that is going to be playing a role in the forward chronological search and where do we do these kind of a
• 14:30 - 15:00 searches so there are certain ah databases that are available which contain the entire collection of journals and conference proceedings that will be collected together and one needs to have a subscription for these services to have access in spec and combine compendex are some such databases pubmed is relevant for the medical community and we have of course maths in it and chemical abstract services so if our libraries have access to
• 15:00 - 15:30 these databases then we can have an ability to search a large number of articles and conference proceedings in one place the backward chronological search basically what it means is that we are going to look at an article and see what all the papers that it is referring to which will be basically older than the article and then look at among those references what are relevant for that topic and then going recursively back in time so this
• 15:30 - 16:00 way actually we can go and discover the entire background of a particular research area forward chronological research is something that works in a different manner we basically first identify a very important paper in our area of research and then we will see what all those publications that are citing this particular paper which means that they are going to come in the future in the sense let us say we have identified a very good paper in 1994 then all those
• 16:00 - 16:30 papers that are published after 94 which are referring to this particular paper and among those there will be some which will be very relevant to us and then we are going to pick them and then we will see which of the papers after those have cited those particular papers and that way we can go forward in time obviously we can come only up to the year that we are searching because the paper that will be published in future are not yet available to us at this point maybe by the volume number wise maybe one year ahead
• 16:30 - 17:00 we may be able to see the papers that are coming in but not beyond so what are the kind of information sources that we can use where the citation information will be available so here again subscription is required and two such sources i am going to show you one is the thompson isa company's web of science and the other is corpus and these two are seen as the most popular sources of information for citation and i am going to show you a
• 17:00 - 17:30 demonstration of how to look up the important research results in a particular area using these sources a word about publishers roughly about 80 percent of the publications in the journal forms are done by a very limited number of companies that i have listed here lcvs and springer together they take up majority of the journal publications in the world and then comes the taylor and francis group nature publications group and many
• 17:30 - 18:00 publishing and then there are a large number of journals that are published by societies american physical society american institute of physics etc so there are journals that are published by societies and they are also publishing houses so we must know where to find the websites of online resources for these publishers so that we can search for our articles there online articles are also available in a full text form from portals that
• 18:00 - 18:30 are run by the respective publishers so science direct is one such portal that is run by elsevier springer link is a portal run by the springer publishing group and we have many such online sources that i am listing here we will open up some of those sites and then see how we can capture those full texts that are available against subscription so sometimes it is also possible that the articles that are being published
• 18:30 - 19:00 can come to our desk without our intervention so what we mean by that is we do not have to go to the journal website every month to check what is new there is something called rss feed subscription or content subscription so we can enroll our email with those respective publishers and then they will actually update us if there are new articles or if there are new issues every month and that way we can see that the literature survey is being pushed to our inboxes rather than we going in searching
• 19:00 - 19:30 naturally accessing the articles that come with links in our emails through these subscriptions will require a subscription from our library however the basic information such as the title authors and the article details such as volume issue number and page number etc will be available in our inbox through these subscriptions sometimes it is also very useful to visit special interest group websites one example is imechanica.org
• 19:30 - 20:00 which is an interest group for mechanical engineering community these groups or these group websites will basically discuss about ongoing work in that particular domain so it is a very good idea to check out some such sites that may be active for your research area so when we want to then write up we need to basically organize these references in a numerical manner one after other in the sequence of referencing in the document
• 20:00 - 20:30 or maybe chronological order or alphabetical order so we must be aware of what are the different styles in which the references are required for a particular document this may be varying from university to university and also from a publisher to publisher when we want to send our manuscript for publication so it is very important for example to use the reference manager to be able to change the style depending upon the source of information and the target where we want to send our document
• 20:30 - 21:00 i will be introducing some of those reference managers my favorite one is jabref which is a open source and freely available software i will be actually doing a brief demonstration of this software there are many paid ones also which i have listed here and some of them may be subscribed by your library for your university you must check with your library what are available for your university as far as reference managers are concerned there is also a very nice comparison of all the reference management softwares
• 21:00 - 21:30 on wikipedia you may want to have a look at it before you decide which ones to use and i would like to thank professor and my colleagues for helping me with some of the pointers for this slide still now you