Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
all significant work is a critical part of doing research. It is typically the case, too,
that the scope of literature that is relevant to you may only be obvious once you have
completed the investigative phase of your research and have a good draft of your
literature review. Your topic and interests are likely to shift, focus, or broaden during
your research, and your perspective will change as your understanding develops—
update your searching as you go.
Searching and reading are separate activities, and it is a mistake to try and do both
at once. I recommend that you uncritically gather material and then later critically
analyze and categorize. Save the papers you find into a directory, and go through it
later to understand what you have found. In the context of a single search session, it
is also helpful to restrict your attention to one or two specific topics.
Having explored the literature, you may discover that your original idea is not
so original after all. If so, be honest—review your work to see what aspects may
be novel, but don't fool yourself into working on a problem that is already solved.
Occasionally it happens, for example, that the same problem has been investigated
by several other teams over a considerable period. At the same time, the fact that
other people have worked on the same problem does not mean that it is impossible
to make further contributions in the area.
Critical Reading
A key aim of reading is to develop critical thinking skills. Good researchers must
demonstrate their ability to objectively analyze the work and claims of others. With
experience, you can place each paper in a context of other work that you know, and
assess it on a range of characteristics.
In doing so, you will become alert to common mistakes and bogus claims. A
challenge of research literature is whether to believe what you read. Work published
in a reputable journal or conference is peer-reviewed; work available online could
have any history, from being a prepublication version of an accepted journal paper to
being plagiarised work poorly translated from a non-English original. A cynical but
often accurate rule of thumb is that work that is more than one or two years old and
has not been published in a significant venue probably has some serious defect. When
you find a version of a paper on the Web, establish whether it has been published
somewhere. Use evidence such as the quality of the author's other publications to
establish whether it is part of a serious program of research.
Much research—far too much—is just misguided. People investigate problems
that are already solved and well understood, or solve problems that technology has
made irrelevant, or don't realise that the proposed improvement actually makes the
method worse. Mathematics may be pointless; the wrong property may be proved,
such as complexity instead of correctness; assumptions may be implausible; evalua-
tion strategies may not make sense. The data set used may be so tiny that the results
are meaningless. Some results are just plain wrong. And, while the fact that a paper is
 
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