How to do Literature Review

Amit Awekar

Points to keep in mind before you start
1. Human beings do research (at least till today) : Talk to your advisor to find out leading researchers in your area of interest.
2. Good research is generally published at a good venue : Better know before hand where to dig.

Here is my strategy
1. Decide your area of interest
2. Find out leading researchers in the field
3. Where they are publishing? Which conferences? Which journals? Who funds them?
4. Which problems or topics are being addressed in last couple of years? Which problems are unsolved for long time? Which problems are emerging?
5. Which are interesting problems/ topics for me?
6. For problems / topics that interest me which are

• Latest papers
• Survey papers
• Key papers

7. Read each paper using your reading strategy. e.g Here is my reading strategy. 8. Build a cohesive story using each paper as a building block. Be creative in establishing links between different papers / problems. Try to generalize the solutions by analyzing them in more abstract way. 9. As a graduate student you are more interested in open problems. That's the reason you did all this review. Work hard over this section.