Literature survey
Steps to find a research question.
Set up Zotero
- install program
- set up connector
- (optional) set up zotero account
- start zotero and create collection for your field
Collect relevant papers
Search for keywords on academic search engines.
Add to Zotero collection using the connector browser extension.
Read abstracts
Abstracts follow a similar structure to the thesis itself:
- Field
- Research gap
- Novelty
- Evidence
- Conclusion
- keywords (optional)
To start with, choose 3 papers that you find most interesting or relevant to your problem. For each of them, assign each sentence to one of the above categories. It is possible that some sentences may fall into multiple categories while some none, use your judgement.
The aim of this exercise is to understand broadly which research questions have already been answered, and what field currently focusses on. It will also encourage you to search for the 'real' novelty as opposed to the claims made by the authors. Finally, it provides structure so you can compare various abstracts and quickly judge the ones relevant to you.
At the end, you should ideally have a table like :
| title | abstract | field | research gap | novelty | evidence | conclusion | keywords |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| . | |||||||
| . | |||||||
| . |
You can copy and paste the above into excel, excel365, google sheets and other spreadsheet software.
Tips
- Take a look at the rubric's section on originality of research to get an intuition of what constitutes original research.
- While reading, keep in mind that it is possible that some papers you read may not be well written. Think about what is lacking and how it could be improved.
- Think about how you would pose the research question for the paper you are reading.
- One clear sign of a research gap is the phrase 'However, ...'.
- Try to imagine the graphs/tables that would answer the research question in your opinion.
- Look for concrete metrics to establish what is currently possible.
- Examine the validity of the conclusions based on the data and methodology used.
- Get a feel for benchmarks and associated metrics that are commonly used.
- Survey papers are a good source of public datasets and code.