Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
gathered, how they might obtain or create the data for themselves, and background
on issues such as limitations of the data.
Most experiments yield far more data than can be presented in a paper of rea-
sonable length. Important results can be summarized in a graph or a table, and other
outcomes reported in a line or two. It is acceptable to state that experiments have
yielded a certain outcome without providing details, so long as those experiments
do not affect the main conclusions of the paper (and have actually been performed).
Similarly, there may be no need to include the details of proofs of lemmas or minor
theorems. This does not excuse you from conducting the experiments or convincing
yourself that the results are correct, but such information can be kept in logs of the
research rather than included in the paper.
In a thesis, each chapter has structure, including an introduction and a summary or
conclusions. This structure varies with the chapter's purpose. A background chapter
may gather a variety of topics necessary to understanding of the contribution of the
thesis, for example, whereas a chapter on a new algorithm may have a simple linear
organization in which the parts of the algorithm are presented in turn. However, the
introduction and summary should help to link the thesis together—and thus showhow
each chapter builds on previous chapters and how subsequent chapters make use of it.
Literature Review
Few results or experiments are entirely new. Usually they are extensions of or cor-
rections to previous research—that is, most results are an incremental addition to
compare the new results to similar previously published results, to describe existing
knowledge, and to explain how it is extended by the new results. A survey can also
help a reader who is not expert in the field to understand the paper and may point to
standard references such as texts or survey articles.
In an ideal paper, the literature review is as interesting and thorough as the descrip-
tion of the paper's contribution. There is great value for the reader in a precise analysis
of previous work that explains, for example, how existing methods differ from one
another and what their respective strengths and weaknesses are. Such a review also
creates a specific expectation of what the contribution of the paper should be—it
shapes what the readers expect of your work, and thus shapes how they will respond
to your ideas. It is where the reader learns why the problem is a challenge and also
learns about the limitations of simple or previous solutions.
The literature review can be early in a paper, to describe the context of the work,
and might in that case be part of the introduction; or, less commonly, the literature
review can follow or be part of the main body, at which point a detailed comparison
between the old and the new can be made. If the literature review is late in a paper,
it is easier to present the surveyed results in a consistent terminology, even when the
cited papers have differing nomenclature and notation.
In some papers the literature review material is not gathered into a single section,
but is discussed where it is used—background material in the introduction, analysis
