Projects

1
Projects

• Literature Review

2
What is it?

• An account of what has been written about your
  chosen subject by acknowledged experts in the
  field
• It will eventually form part of your final
  submitted report (April) but will first feed into
  your poster to be presented on Wednesday 11th
  December
• It will probably be about 3,000 5,000 words
  long references (but will be heavily abridged
  in the poster)
• Tackling it early will pay off later!

3
What does it look like?

• It consists of two parts
• The main body which is a discourse. Read papers
  and theses to get the style. (In particular,
  look at survey papers)
• The list of references, written using the IEEE
  method

4
What is it for?

• It demonstrates your skills
• The ability to seek out relevant information
• The ability to critically analyse work that may
  sometimes be conflicting
• The ability to summarise your findings
• The ability to write all this down in a readable
  form
• It shows that you have a good understanding of
  current work in your chosen subject area
• It serves as an introduction to the rest of your
  work and puts it into context

5
Where do I get the information?

• Remember, the information should come from
  acknowledged experts so good sources are
• Peer reviewed journals particularly ACM and
  IEEE
• Books that are referenced a lot
• Peer-reviewed Conference proceedings
• RFCs
• PhD theses

6
Where do I get the information from? Careful.

• There may be good information here but be
  careful
• Commercial whitepapers
• Commercial websites
• Publications from trade organizations
• Conferences and journals that are not
  peer-reviewed.why not?
• (Remember to be a CAT!)

7
Where do I get the information?Be Very Careful!

• You will not usually reference these but they may
  sometimes give you a link to good information
• Magazine articles
• Wikipedias (use as a starting point to find
  valid refs.)
• Personal websites
• Check how old the information is. All books and
  journals and conference proceedings more than
  about 3 years old are probably only useful as
  historical background.

8
How do I Access the Sources

• Glyndwr library (Athens, etc.)
• Other libraries
• Internet
• Search engines
• Google scholar
• CiteSeer
• DBLP