Literature review

This page gives some initial tips for doing your academic literature review.

When approaching a new project, our main goal is the understand the main subjects discussed and figure out what are the main contributions made in the project's field of research.

The main platform to use when performing our literature review is Google Scholar.

''Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.''

Basically, Google scholar is a search engine for academic literature. This is a convenient platform to look for papers, citing them, looking for referred papers etc. We can either search for papers by inserting their title, or by inserting key words which we are interested in (from as general as "machine learning" to as specific as "entropy rate of continuous ergodic Markov chains"). The list of search results is organised by relevance and importance (i.e., amount of citations).

Tip: If you have some researcher, which operated in the same field as you do, you can set up alarms for this entity and receive mail whenever she/he publishes a new paper.

Another tool to understand the main building blocks in your field of interest is the connected papers website. For a given paper, this page provides a visualisation of all papers citing the our paper of interest and all works this paper cites. The visualisation is through a connected graphs, in which the nodes sizes are determined by the impact of the paper (i.e., number of citations). This is a great tool to make sure we did not miss any important work done in our field of research. This tool does not replace google scholar, but only come as an extra aid.