Step 2: Literature, Theory

What is the purpose of literature review?

1
Topic
 Definition
 Benefits
 Sources to look in to
 Searching strategies
 Reading /evaluating /organizing
 Some more tips
 Revisiting objectives/RQ/hypothesis

2
Literature Review (LR)
 In general, students don’t understand the purpose of
investigating literature
 Its function – the more one knows the more knowledgeably
one can approach the problems
 Re+view = look again at what others have done in areas that
are similar, though not necessarily identical to, one’s own area
of investigation
 As a researcher, you should know the literature about your
topic very, very well
 Many benefits from reviewing
 Conceptual and
 Empirical works

3
Benefits of Literature Review
 It can offer new ideas, perspectives, and approaches that may not
have occurred to you
 It can inform you about other researchers who conduct work in
this area – individuals whom you may wish to contact for advice
or feedback
 It can show you how others have handled methodological and
design issues in studies similar to your own
 It can reveal sources of data that you may not have known existed
 It can introduce you to measurement tools that other researchers
have developed and used effectively
 Available literature/theory is reviewed to determine if there is
already a solution to the problem.
 The existing solution might require some revision or even be discarded.

4
Cont…
 It can reveal methods of dealing with problematic
situations that may be similar to difficulties you are facing
 It can help you interpret and make sense of your findings
and, ultimately, help you tie your results to the work of
those who have preceded you
 It will reinforce your confidence that your topic is one
worth studying, because you will find that others have
invested considerable time, effort, and resources in
studying it

5
Cont…
 For MSc. And PhD, the second last benefit is of particular value
 Theses are presumed to be original investigations into unexplored
area
 Important - you should know where others have been and
what activities they have been engaged

Generally Literature
 Provides theoretical base on which to build a rationale for
your study
 Helps in justifying that your work is new
 Provides potential research methodologies and methods of
measurement
 Help you interpret your results and relate them to what is
already known in the field
6
Where to look at?

7
Where to Begin
 Library catalog – Locate books relevant to your research
topic – may be general textbooks in your discipline or
collections of articles written by a variety of experts in
the field
 Indexes and Abstracts – Begin with periodical in your
academic area – Computer Science
 Online databases - Access to the literature which contain
enormous collections of citations or abstracts related to
various subjects and disciplines

8
 In addition to using the library catalog, indexes and abstracts, and
online databases, the following strategies are suggested
 Looking at government publications
 Surfing the World Wide Web, (Google scholar, Research Gate ,
University websites…and
 Using the citations and reference lists of those who have gone
before you – track down any references that you see cited by three or
more other researchers because such references are clearly
influencing current work in your field and should not be overlooked.

 Be systematic and thorough

 Relate bibliography to problem

9
Conducting a Literature Search
1. Write the problem in its entirety at the top of the page or
computer screen
2. Write down each subproblem in its entirety as well
3. Identify the important words and phrases in each
subproblem
4. Translate these words and phrases into specific topics that
you must learn more about. These topics become your
“agenda” as you read the literature
5. Go to the source /library to seek out resources related to
your agenda
6. Read!

10
Evaluating, Organising, and
Synthesizing the Literature
 Too many literature reviews do nothing more than report
what other people have done and said

 In a good literature review, the researcher doesn’t merely

report the related literature
 He or she also evaluates, organises, and synthesizes what
others have done
 Do not only read other people’s work but you must also critically
evaluate their methods and conclusions

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Evaluating, Organising, and
Synthesizing the Literature
 Never take other people’s conclusions at face value; determine for
yourself whether their conclusions are justified based on the data
presented
 In addition to evaluating what you read, you must also organize
the ideas you encounter during your review
 The subproblems within your main problem should, in many cases,
provide a general organisational scheme you can use
 Looking at how other authors have organised literature reviews
related to your topic may be helpful as well

12
Evaluating, Organising, and
Synthesizing the Literature
 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you must synthesize
what you have learned from your review
 In other words, you must pull together the diverse perspectives
and research results you have read into a cohesive whole

 Here are some examples of what you might do:

 Compare and contrast varying theoretical perspectives
on the topic
 Show how approaches to the topic have changed over
time

13
Cont…
 Describe general trends in research findings
 Identify discrepant or contradictory findings, and suggest
possible explanations for such discrepancies
 Identify general themes that run throughout the literature
 When you write a literature review that does such
things, you have contributed something new to the
knowledge in the field even before you have conducted
your own study
 In fact, a literature review that makes such a
contribution is often publishable in its own right

14
Writing LR - Guidelines
1. Get the proper psychological orientation
2. Have a plan
3. Emphasise relatedness
4. Give credit where credit is due
5. Review the literature. Don’t reproduce it!
6. Summarise what you have read
7. Remember that your first draft will almost certainly
NOT be your last draft
8. Ask others for advice and feedback

15
Don’t Reproduce the Literature!
 Review the literature. Don’t reproduce it – writing LR is
one of the most challenging works– requires that you
keep a clear focus
 Not simply quoting long passages or cite at length the
words or ideas of others
 Students consider LR as merely a conventional filler –
something that everyone does

16
 Don’t Reproduce the Literature!
 As important as what others say about their research, and perhaps
even more important, is what you say about their research
 Your emphasis should always be on how a particular idea or
research finding relates to your own problem – something that only
you can discuss
 Advice – guidelines
1. Present your own discussion
2. Paraphrase (precis (short statement of the main points of a
speech or piece of writing), resume (summary), give a synopsis, an
epitome (person or thing that is the perfect example of a quality
or type))
3. Use short, direct quotations if necessary
4. Long quotations are a last resort. Use them only for a very good
reason – for instance, when the specific words that an author
17
uses are as important as the ideas that the author presents
Thus
 A literature review is a necessity.
 Without this step, you won’t know if your problem has been
solved or what related research is already underway.
 When performing the review:
 Start searching professional journals.
 Begin with the most recent articles you can find.
 Keep track of relevant articles in a bibliography.
 Don’t be discouraged if work on the topic is already
underway.
 (Use LaTeX has a much steeper learning curve when
compared with MS Word that is true. However, getting a
basic
Taken LaTeXConcepts
from: Research (text, by
figures, titles,
Chris Jones tables)
and Xiaoping Jia document is not
(minor modifications so
by Nayda
difficult.)
Santiago)
 LaTeX

LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and

publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as
free software.
Why do researchers use LaTeX?
 LaTeX can create scientific documents that look
professional and accurately reflect the precise
equations and other graphics necessary to express
the researcher's work.
 Some other advantages of using this to prepare a research
paper are: It is used extensively in the academic/scientific
community

19
Literature Review Pitfalls
 Be very careful to check your sources when doing
your literature review.
 Many trade magazines are not peer reviewed.
 Professional conferences and journals often have each article
reviewed by multiple people before it is even recommended
for publication.
 The IEEE and ACM digital libraries are good places to start
looking for legitimate research.

Taken from: Research Concepts by Chris Jones and Xiaoping Jia (minor modifications by Nayda
Santiago)
Literature Review Pitfalls (cont.)
 The Internet can be a good source of information. It
is also full of pseudo-science and poor research.
 Make sure you verify the claims of any documentation
that has not been peer reviewed by other
professionals in the computing industry.

Taken from: Research Concepts by Chris Jones and Xiaoping Jia (minor modifications by Nayda
Santiago)
ACM

22
Development/revisiting of objectives,
Research questions and working
hypotheses

23
Developing objectives and Working Hypothesis …cont’d

Some guidelines in developing objectives:

– Objectives must be specific, concrete and
achievable statements;
– The objectives should clearly fit to the
statement of the problem
– The objectives must propose to do things as
per the capability of the design of the study.
– Objectives should be in their approximate
order of importance.

24
Developing objectives and Working Hypothesis …cont’d

A hypothesis must be
– Specific
– Conceptually clear in terms of common definitions
– Testable (verification or rejection) by available
techniques and resources;
– Related to a body of theory;
– Stated to provide direction for the research;
– Formulated as causal relationships;

25
Cont…
 Often PhD dissertations/thesis fail to make explicit their
hypothesis / thesis.
 Sometimes the reader can hardly “find” them implicit in a
section of “contributions” of the dissertation.

 Research question
 In cases where we don’t have a hypothesis, a problem
statement should also end with a research question
 Putting a the problem in a question form so that it guides
the research process.
 How many RQ
 You may have 3-5
 Some says research may only have one
26
RQ example

27
Step 3: Research Design
 If you fail to plan, you planned to fail !
 It is the entire design/plan of the research project
 It is said as the research proposal
 It involves deciding on all aspects of the research process, of
course focusing on methodology
 Includes planning in detail all the steps of the experimental phase.
 In engineering research it often includes the design of a
prototype / system architecture.
 That includes
 Philosophical assumption, General Research methodology
(approach)-Specific method (research design), Data collection
techniques, Data analysis, and solution development,
Evaluation/validation
 Publication outlet if possible
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 It matters to get your proposal accepted or rejected
Cont…
 Research methodologies reflect high-level approaches in
conducting research.
 The individual steps within the methodology might vary
based on the research problem being performed.
 There are three broad approaches to be used in research
design (alone or in combination)
 Quantitative.
 Qualitative.
 Design science

 More on chapter 3

29
Research Design helps
Design in many ways
of research …cont’d

– It sets up the framework for adequate tests of

relationships among study variables.
– It tells what observations to make/what
variables to measure, how to make
them/measure them, and how to analyze the
data;
– It suggests how many observations to make
and the type of statistical analysis to use;
30
31
Step 4: Develop
Instruments/procedures
 Can also be part of the research design
 Instruments
 Two possibilities ; adopting from literature and crafting based on
objectives /RQ
 There are different data collection Methods/sources
1. From human data source : Questionnaire , Interview (structured and
unstructured interview, Observation
2. From non-human source- Extracting methods

1. Computer log files, Web files

2. Document analysis
3. Daily transaction records, Speech files
4. Camera (for security, face recognition etc…

32
Cont…
 For survey and other qualitative researches
 Develop your instrument to measure your variables
 You can get some instrument from published articles
 One variable can be measured by multiple questions
 Check the instrument if it is useful for your context: add new
questions or remove irrelevant ones
 Use statistical tools to check instrument validity
 Undertake pilot testing before you use your instrument in the
actual survey
 Statistical tools can be used like Cronbach Alpha and Reliability
Tests

33
Procedures
 For most experimental and design researches
 Data sources
 How? How many ?
 How to make the data/ requirement ready?
 Process and techniques
 How to make and measure the experiment/design/analysis?
 Etc…

More on Chapter 3

34
Step 5: Data Collection and Analysis
 Data collection
 From human and/or non-human sources
 The procedure and or the instrument has to be explained
 Follow and adhere to the research design
 Train your data collectors if you use data collectors
 Monitor data collection in the field
 Wrong data will result wrong conclusions
 Check your data if it is taken from databases for reliability

35
Cont…
 Analysis
 The data that were gathered are analyzed in ascertaining their meaning.
 Quantitative researches Involves statistical analyses, for the most part.
 The specific statistical tests and procedures depend on the nature of
the underlying data.
 Machine learning approaches /experiments
 In Design researches -Identify design inputs and evaluation criteria,
Implementation of methods (e.g. prototyping) and auxiliary tools (e.g.
simulation)
 Qualitative researchers use words to understand and describe the
phenomena
 Coding /pattern matching /narration

 More on chapter four

36
Step 6: Result/solution design and Interpretation
 The researcher discuss/interprets the newly analyzed data or
provide solutions (implementations) and suggests a conclusion.
 Interpretation means identifying relationship between
variables/and or other works to draw conclusions
 Provide lessons from designing a solution or doing
experimentations
 Evaluation of design solutions
 Meaning of Testing hypothesis if any – Reject or Accept
 Provide explanations for accepting or rejecting / how novel or
new is the result….

 Example :The Data for SW success shows low figures, below our
expectation.What it tells us! Does it mean the SW failed? What
37 causes the Failure? How do we overcome those Failures?
Cont…
 What did your analysis/experiment/design show?
 Discussion in light of Literature, Research objectives and
Research questions.

38
Cont…
 The data will either support the propositions and hypotheses
or they won’t.
 The evaluation /testing in experimental and design research
will indicate further work too.
 This may lead the researcher to cycle back to an earlier step
in the process and begin again with a new hypothesis.
 This is one of the self-correcting mechanisms associated
with the scientific method.

 More details in chapter four

39
Step 7-Proposal /Report writing
 Last step?????????
 There are basically two main documents in the process of
a research.
 A proposal
 A final report (conference paper, journal article, thesis,
dissertation…)
 Slight tolerable difference on the format content and
structure.

40
Cont…

Will be covered in the chapter 5

41
Final Words

42
Review questions
 Where can we get a research problem – topic?
 What is the purpose of reviewing literature?
 Explain the major steps in a research process?

43