Reference no: EM131019406

Discuss the following questions: Why do we cite the work of others? What constitutes a good source?

RMT: Research Methods Training

Stage 1 in: Final project and Dissertation

Lecture 3: Literary Search and Scientific Paper Reading and Writing

Sources of Information

As research aims to add to the world's body of knowledge, researchers must be aware of the existing body of knowledge for the area in which they work It is therefore important that the researcher knows how to search for that data and has the ability to read, understand, and interpret it.

Thus, one of the most important issues when conducting research is the ability to search for meaningful information in the vast world of data that surrounds us.

With the invention of the Internet and the WWW, much more information is available to us than at any other time in history. This is a blessing, but it also poses a problem - how the proper and relevant information can be found.

The frontiers of the world's body of knowledge are not documented in text books, but rather in:

Remember that reading this kind of literature is important in ide   ntifying a problem that is academically credible. If the problem in which you are interested is not discussed in the academic literature, you should probably conclude that it is your definition of the problem that is at fault. Knowing how to access the information is thus the first step in research. By now you should know how to do this, having taken the self-paced "Information Literacy Resource". If you haven't taken it by now then it is strongly suggested that you do it as soon as possible, overlapping it with the current course or even taking a break from this training and the "DS" course until you have done so (of course, you will notify your DA if you do this).

A helpful guide to the "Best Search for Your Information Need" is found at (Best Search, 2006).

Library Training Module

By now you should have taken the Library Training Module self-paced course and be well acquainted with its units (Library Training Module, 2015):

Unit 1: Library Foundations
Unit 2: Searching for E-Resources
Unit 3: Referencing and Plagiarism
Unit 4: Your Subject Area: Computing
Unit 5: Research and Study Skills

All of the above have to do with the subject matter of this seminar. In case you have not taken it yet or have not worked through all the units, we suggest that you stop reading this lecture at this point and complete the missing parts of the Library Training Module which is found at the Library. Links to additional instructions and tutorials are listed in the DS Template.

Literature Search

The following is a short description of Literature Search which complements (but does not replace) the above mentioned Library Training Module.

You can search for literature through many different sources, such as: Literature Sources, Databases and Search Engines (of publishers, literature DBs and Web Search Engines).

The questions you should ask are "what am I trying to find out?" and "what type of information do I want to find?" Is it an overview of a subject area? Is it an answer to a specific question? Or is it just a specific document? Define why you need this information and how quickly do I need it: if immediately then try the Internet, if in a day maybe the library will help or if it in a week then you can use the inter Library Loans.

Sources for literature on the Internet are freely available collections, publishers' websites and databases and literature databases.

Interrelation of Sources
- Authors submit paper to conference/journal for peer review
- If accepted, paper is revised by the authors and submitted to conference/journal editor
- The paper is processed to bring it into the publisher's format (typesetting/layout)
- The paper is then
- included in the publisher's database,
- made available on-line via the publisher's website, and
- possibly published in printed form (not necessarily in that order)
- Literature databases
- collect the bibliographic information from several publishers, and
- add additional information (references with links, citation index)
- link back to publisher for full-text of papers

Databases and search engines of publishers
Access to full-text requires authentication by NWS login and password.

While the databases cover a vast number of journals and conferences, but not all of them and not textbooks, handbooks and technical report the web search engines provide much better coverage of these types of publications but also return a lot of irrelevant material and leave it to the user to distinguish high quality from low quality material.

Citation and Referencing

For your dissertation you will need to use the University of Liverpool's version of the Harvard Referencing Conventions (See "Referencing: Library for Online Programmes").

Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography is where apart from the raw details about the author's name, the name of the book or article and the publishing details there is a short comments of few lines that outlines the subject of the item.

Examples:
Dawson, C.W. (2015) Projects in Computing and Information Systems: A Student's Guide, 3rd edition, Pearson [The book is intended to provide the student with a systematic approach to conducting projects in Computing. It combines theoretical material as well as true life cases.]

Illowsky, B., Dean, S., Collaborative Statistics https://cnx.org/content/col10522/latest/ (Last accessed 2 September 2011)
[A free and comprehensive textbook on all aspects of statistics that can be found in the Connexion project. Not an easy book yet it covers the full spectrum of statistics.]

Annotated bibliographies add to the knowledge to the reader and prove that the author of the article is acquainted with the information contained in the reference. It is highly recommended that your bibliographical notes in the proposal will be annotated as this might speed up the approval of the proposals.

For additional discussion and examples see Dawson (2015, 8.5) and 2.3.2 in the Guidelines.

Please note that you must use the Harvard style as specified in the DS Guidelines and as described in "Referencing: Library for Online Programmes"

Reading, Evaluating (and maybe Writing) Research Papers

As you might do a lot of reading of scientific research papers, we should devote some time to learn how to read such papers.

Most scientific research papers are set out in a uniform way according to a template. In the case of computer science, an example is the ACM (ACM SIG Proceedings Templates, 2006).

We will now analyze the ACM template, which is a set of instructions on how to write papers in the form of a proceedings paper (A Sample ACM SIG Proceedings Paper). Please note that we are analyzing the LaTex example, as it is more detailed than the Word template.

We find that after the heading/title and the name of the author(s), their institutional affiliation and contact information,

- As short as possible, but without abbreviations or acronyms (unless they are commonly understood)
- As specific as necessary and as general as possible (e.g. ‘The Complexity of Theorem- Proving Procedures'
introduced the notion of ‘NP-Completeness' starting point of complexity theory)
- Include key phrases which are likely to be used in a search on the topic of the paper (e.g. ‘modal logic', ‘calculus', ‘decision procedure')
- Avoid phrases which are too common (e.g. ‘novel')
- Use phrases that describe distinctive features of the work (e.g. ‘Real-world Reasoning with OWL')
- An author of a paper is an individual who made a significant intellectual contribution to the work described in the paper (in contrast, for example, to a monetary contribution); made a contribution to drafting, reviewing and/or revising the paper for its intellectual contribution (in contrast, for example, to spell checking or typesetting); and approved the final version of the paper including references

Some organizations / publishers have strict rules regarding authorship
- Order of authors may depend on subject area: pure theory often alphabetical applied research often based on contribution research assessment (e.g. bibliographic measures associating order with contribution) cultural context

- In Computer Science, academic degrees and membership of professional organizations are typically not indicated

- List of authors is typically followed by contact information consisting of affiliation and e- mail address (not postal address)

An Abstract always appears which gives a very short synopsis of the article.

An abstract is an important feature of the dissertation document. The main reasons for an abstract is that it allows the reader to quickly grasp (i) the essence of the project and if it interests him/her, (ii) to get the overall picture of what the work is about ("the 30000 feet view"). Sometimes within the abstract there is additional indexing information (ACM does have it) in the form of Categories, General Terms and Keywords - all of which enable the reader (and indexing databases) to quickly index and decide if the article is of interest.

Two good short tutorials how to write abstracts are "How to Write an Abstract" (Koopman, 1997) and "Abstracts" (UNC, 1998).

Following the Abstract is the Introduction (please note that sometimes that this heading is missing), which usually supplies the background and the rationale for the entire research undertaking that ended up in the paper.

After an exposition of the current state of knowledge in the specific field (related work),

- Related work is previous work by the same or other authors which addresses the same or closely related problems / topics
- Section on related work gives credit to such work and establishes the originality of the
- State the general area of research (unless this is obvious from the context in which the paper appears)
- Introduce the problem - state why the problem is important and/or interesting
- Outline the approach taken to solve the problem
- Outline the solution or principal results - state why the results are important and/or interesting
- Do not repeat the abstract
- Avoid platitudes and clichés
- Typically not more than 100-150 words
- Should aim to motivate people to read the paper
- Highlight the problem and the principal results
- The abstract will be included in literature databases make sure key phrases which might be used in searches are included (same principle as for titles)
- Keep references to a minimum
- Keep equations and other mathematical expressions to a minimum

- Some journals allow authors to provide longer descriptions of themselves including photographs the author will indicate the relevance of his/her contribution to that field of knowledge.

In projects in which a hypothesis is to be tested, the author will spell out the hypothesis, what the anticipated outcome is, and hint at the results and conclusions. You should stop reading the paper here if you find that it is not of interest to you, as otherwise you will then begin the main part of the paper.

Outline of the paper:

As the article we are looking at instructs us how to write articles, the main part of it is properly called The Body of the Paper. An article about another subject would have another heading that describes the specific subject. As noted in the template, this section is usually ordered in an hierarchical structure and indeed, we find that this section has sub-sections and sub-sub-sections all properly numbered. One of the important sub-sections will describe the methods and tools that were employed in the research. As we have seen, an important criterion of published papers is the ability for others to duplicate the findings. There should be enough information in this section to convince the reader of the feasibility of the research and the results, and enough exposure of the tools so that the experiment could be duplicated.

- Depends strongly on subject area and topic of the paper

- Typical structure of a Computer Science paper on theoretical research: Basic definitions

Description of a new algorithm, calculus, or formalism Sequence of theorems accompanied by proof or proof sketches Applications / consequences of the results (optional)

- Typical structure of a Computer Science paper on applied research: Architecture of a new system
Description of the realization

- Typically at the end of the introduction

- Describes the content of the body of the paper section by section

Example:

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we introduce . . . Section 3 describes . . . Finally, we describe future work in Section 5.

(Note that ‘Section' is capitalized.)
current work

- Extent depends on the space available and relevance of the related work to the work presented in the paper

- Within these two constraints, make sure all related work is cited and correctly described

- Failure to give credit can result in a bad evaluation and kill your paper

- Section on related work is either part of the introduction or is placed at the end of the body of the paper

The results/findings are usually the last sub-section of the Body. The results as explained should satisfy the objective of the research as set forward in the Introduction and the first paragraph of the Body. It should close the loop that started with assumptions and suggestions, continued with a description of the tools and methods, provided descriptions of what has been done, and end with the results.

The next part is the Conclusions.

Any hypothesis and speculations must now be addressed and the value of the new finding analyzed (i) to show that the results tested the hypothesis set forth at the beginning of the research, and (ii) to show its scholarly merit by specifying what it contributed to the knowledge in this field. This is the moment when the reader, working his/her way through the paper, should decide if the paper was worth reading.
The remaining sections of the paper are the Acknowledgments to those that helped the author and a section (or a sub section) that gives credit to other participating authors.

The paper should end with the References list of books, papers, reports, and links consulted during the project and mentioned in the paper.
So, how do we read and evaluate a research paper?

See the section on citing and referencing
- Acknowledges external funding sources
- Thanks non-authors that made a significant contribution
- colleagues or fellow researchers with which the authors had
- discussions related to the topic of the paper
- anonymous referees provided they have given exceptional
- level of feedback or important insights
- Summarizes the contributions of the paper
- Describes the implications and/or applications of the contributions made by the paper
- Outlines future directions of research

Evaluation
- Combinations of the two are possible and quite typical
- Papers on action research, case studies, surveys, experiments are also common and have their own structure

You'll soon find that the amount of reading that you do is very large and you might lose or misplace information because of the amount of material you have made use of. Therefore, it is important to be organized.

For that:
- Maintain a database of all the books and papers you read. Stored data should at least include title, author, place of publication, and place where the document itself can be found.

- It is suggested that you install a management system. A useful tool for collecting and arranging references in your dissertation is a "reference management" program. Two such free tools that you might want to explore are listed in the Cited References and Links section (Reference Mangers, 2006).

The first thing in reading a paper is to decide if it interests you. This can be done by reading the Abstract and then the Introduction. After doing so, you should stop and consider if the paper will be of value to you. If the answer is yes, then we suggest that on the first cycle you skim through the whole paper without bothering to take notes or dwell too long on any section. Even if you don't understand an argument or a formula, keep going in order to develop a mental picture of the whole paper, even if it is a bit fuzzy. This is not a detective story, so you are allowed to peek at the end. View the conclusions at an early stage to decide if they will be of value for your own research.

If you believe that the paper will be of value, start reading it afresh from the beginning, but now don't skim: read it for a full understanding and evaluation. Sometimes you might need to stop reading if the subject is new to you and search for supplemental information from other sources (mentioned in the References section of the paper) or search for your own set of sources. When reading through the paper you might find poor writing, half described experiments, references to sources that are hard to acquire, wrong assumptions, faulty conclusions, and other obstacles. You'll have to overcome these.

For your analysis of the paper, it is recommended that you also keep a record of the answers to some or all of the following questions:

1. What is the main topic of the article?
- Are you sure it will add to your knowledge? Meet your needs?

2. What was/were the main issue(s) the authors said they wanted to discuss?
- This question should be answered while reading the Abstract and the

Introduction.

3. Why did the author claim it was important?
- Evaluate this thoroughly. Many papers might seem important on first sight but later are found to be of no real value.

4. How did the authors claim they were going to evaluate their work and compare it to others?
- Note this down so that you will be able to evaluate their claims in the conclusion section.

5. How does the authors' work build on the work of others, in the authors' opinion?
- Is this a standalone paper? Is it connected to other papers in the field?

6. What simplifying assumptions do the authors claim to be making? Did the authors specify any limitations to their research and results? Are they acceptable or do they diminish the value of the work?

- These are important questions, as in many cases researchers handle only a partial aspect of the subject due to its complexity and/or make simplified assumptions in order to contain the scope of the research. Are the results still credible with these simplifications?

7. What did the author actually do?
- This is the main analysis as it covers the whole of the paper.

8. What are the results, and are they supported by the paper's findings?
- Do you feel comfortable with them?

9. Are the conclusions of value? To you? To others as a direction to a future research?
- Was it worth the effort? Would you recommend it to others? Would you include it in your citations?

By following the above list you will learn how to evaluate research papers. Thus, you should try to evaluate a research paper at the same time you are reading it.

A good way to do it is to try to answer the following two sets of questions that have to do with (a) the overall quality of the paper and (b) with its structure.

(a) Quality:

1. Is the topic of the paper sufficiently interesting (for you personally or in general)?

2. Did the author miss important earlier work?

3. Are the evaluation methods adequate?

4. Are the theorem and proofs correct?

5. Are the arguments convincing?

6. Does the author mention directions for future research that interest you?
(b) Structure:

The major question that should be answered in this category is whether the paper is well structured.

1. Did you find D the Title, Abstract, Introduction, Main section, Conclusions, and References?

2. Was it written clearly? Was the length appropriate?

3. Evaluate the style and language used by the author(s) of the paper.

By considering the answers to these questions for a number of research papers, you should be able to construct a research proposal by considering how you could improve upon the work presented in them.

An interactive tutorial on reading scientific papers is listed in the Cited References and Links (Quick Tutorial, 2006).
Reading:

Cited References and Links:

ACM SIG Proceedings Templates (2006). Available from: https://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

A Sample ACM SIG Proceedings Paper (2006). Available from: https://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/sigproc-sp.pdf (Accessed 4/2/2006)

An animated Quick Tutorial (2006). Available from: https://www.lib.purdue.edu/phys/inst/scipaper.html

Best Search (2006). Available from: https://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.ht ml

Dawson, C. W. (2015)) Projects in Computing and Information Systems: A Student's Guide. Harlow: Pearson.

Koopman, P. (1997). How to Write an Abstract. Available from: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/essays/abstract.html

Library Training Module (2015), Available from: https://libguides.liv.ac.uk/onlineprogrammes/ltm/foundations

Reference Mangers (2006). Available from: https://www.connotea.org

Referencing: Library for Online Programmes (2015), Available from: https://libguides.liv.ac.uk/onlineprogrammes/referencing

UNC (1998). Abstracts. Available from: https://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/abstracts.html

Additional Guidance:

Alan Bundy, How to Write an Informatics Paper. https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bundy/how-tos/writingGuide.html

Simon Payton Jones, How to write a great research paper. https://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/giving-a-talk/writing-a-paper- slides.pdf

Jennifer Widom, Tips for Writing Technical Papers. https://infolab.stanford.edu/~widom/paper-writing.html January 2006

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