Literature Survey

G. Phanikumar
gphani@iitm.ac.in

11.12.2015

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Please note

Literature Survey is not Google

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Outline

Literature Survey: Why?

Sources of Literature

Strategies

Publishers

Writing it all up

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Outline

Literature Survey: Why?

Sources of Literature

Strategies

Publishers

Writing it all up

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Literature Survey: Why?

What approaches have others used?

What are the gaps?
What difference are you making?
Novelty in Familiarity and Familiarity in Novelty
Placing in Current Context
Avoiding duplication
Clarification of controversial results
State of the art: extend and build on the work of others.

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Literature survey in the context of thesis

Theses should be based on original research

Unintentional duplication is not acceptable
To gain knowledge of the background work
To establish context of your work
To question, point out anomalies / gaps

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Outline

Literature Survey: Why?

Sources of Literature

Strategies

Publishers

Writing it all up

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Sources of Literature

Open access
INDEST Arrangement
Your Library subscriptions
Peer sharing sources : ResearchGate, academia.edu

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Sources of Literature

Primary Sources
Periodicals
Research Reports
Conference Proceedings
Official Publications
Standards
Theses, Dissertations
To be published works

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Sources of Literature
Secondary Sources
Compilations
Reviews
Reference Books / Handbooks / Encyclopedia / Dictionaries
Textbooks / Monographs
Indexing and Abstracting services

Tertiary Sources
Directories, Year books, Bibliographies
Lists of secondary sources

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Some terminology

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number: Online publication
Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) Catalogue : Books
Research Information Services (RIS) format: Bibiographic Information
BibTeX (.bib) format: Bibiographic Information

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Awareness

Journal Impact Factor

Citation Index
h-index

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Outline

Literature Survey: Why?

Sources of Literature

Strategies

Publishers

Writing it all up

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Strategies to search

Keyword search : systematic manual search

Backward chronological search : snowball or back reference method
Forward chronological search : citation based

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Systematic manual search

Abstracting databases
INSPEC and COMPENDEX (EngineeringVillage)
PubMed
MathSciNet
Chemical Abstract (CA) Service

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Backward chronological search

Back references
Identify the latest relevant paper in your area
Look up each of the references listed
Repeat to extend the tree backward

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Forward chronological search

Citations
Identify the citation classic in your area
Look up which all papers refer to it
Find out which of these are well cited
Repeat to extend the tree forward

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Citation Information

Websites
Thomson ISI / Web of Science (isiknowledge.com)
SciFinder (www.cas.org)
Scopus (www.scopus.com)
Scitation (scitation.aip.org)

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Outline

Literature Survey: Why?

Sources of Literature

Strategies

Publishers

Writing it all up

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Major Publishers

Elsevier
Springer
Taylor and Francis
Nature
Maney Publishing
APS, AIP, ACS, AIChE, TMS, ASM, ACM, IEEE, etc.,

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Online access

ScienceDirect
SpringerLink
InformaWorld
IngentaConnect
crossref.org
prola.aps.org etc.,

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Get others to work for you

Contents subscription
RSS feed subscription
Subscribe to mailing lists
Watch out SIG sites (eg., imechanica.org)

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Outline

Literature Survey: Why?

Sources of Literature

Strategies

Publishers

Writing it all up

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Thesis / Paper

Numerical / Chronological + Alphabetical

Be aware of style guides for each purpose
Use a reference manager

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Reference Managers

JabRef
EndNote
ReferenceManager
ProCite
Mendeley
Zotero
Comparison of reference management software on Wikipedia

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Acknowledgements

Prof. K. Ramamurthy
Colleagues and Students

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Thank you and all the best!

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