Adapted from Lori Pollock's “Research Proposal Learning Experience” course assignment
The goal is to identify the world for your topic, i.e., search for all papers relevant to your topic. You won't read the papers but instead determine relevance based on title and abstract. Search in digital libraries (e.g., ACM, IEEE) and in recent conferences and workshops that cover your topic to find papers. Then, use the bibliographies of recent papers to identify earlier relevant papers. In many digital libraries, you can also see what papers the paper references and who references the given paper. There are also other helpful tools to use for spidering the bibliography, including citeseer and Google Scholar. Use Zotero or another reference management software to organize your papers into collections, e.g., earlier foundation papers on the topic, some are solving subproblem X, some solve subproblem Y, … You can also create tags for the papers.
The result should be
The goal is to have an organized view of the world, not just a long list of papers on the topic, which will help in writing a survey
A literature review should help you understand the timeline, overall contributions, relative merits and limitations of the work embodied in the state-of-the-art in your topic. You need to read only the abstract, introduction, related work, and conclusions sections of each paper. Do this reading in chronological order (or reverse chronological order) of paper publication dates to obtain some sense of how the research has evolved over the years.
Then, develop an outline where you have grouped the papers focusing on very similar problems, and then have a section of the outline for each paper. For each paper, be sure to include a subpart for problem addressed, contribution, findings of any evaluation of the contribution, and limitations. Just one sentence for each of these items is needed. Thus, your outline should look like:
This outline should be in plain text so it is easy to insert into a latex file to start writing.
First, read some Background and Related Work sections of papers to see how they are written. A good literature survey does not just write a separate paragraph on every paper written in the field in any order you want. Rather,
Using your literature review outline (see above) as a template and the the suggestions above, put together your related work section. It takes time and often rewriting to put a related work section together as above.
A related work section should be 1 to 1 1/2 pages in the typical double-column conference paper format. Most are more like 1 page maximum.
Courtesy of Lori Pollock
When reading a research paper, answer the following questions:
In a few sentences in your own words, what is the key insight of this group's approach to tackling the stated problem? What is their overall approach/strategy to solving the problem?