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Technical Writing
ITE 1932
Literature Reviews
An Introduction
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Questions to be answered

 What is a Literature Review

 What is the use of it
 Who writes literature reviews
 How to write a literature review
 What is Plagiarism and how to deal with it
 Where to find literature
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What is a Literature Review

 It is an assessment of the literature and provides a summary, classification, comparison,

evaluation and Synthesis.
 A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area (for you :
Computer Science or a sub topic of Computer Science) Search in Google Scholar for
research papers.
 Most of the time Literature reviews are incorporated into an article, a research paper or
thesis
 Literature Review includes the current knowledge including substantive findings, as well as
theoretical and methodological contributions to a particular topic.
 Literature reviews synthesize the relevant literature in a methodical, coherent manner that
leads to a suitable research question or supports the proposed research.
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What is NOT a literature review

 NOT a list of previous work

 NOT just a collection of summaries of previous work
 NOT an analytical, opinionative or argumentative essay.
 NOT a usual report/essay you write on a specific topic
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More characteristics of Literature Reviews

 Compare and contrast different authors' views on an issue

 Group authors/views who draw similar conclusions,
 Criticize aspects of methodology / Highlight disagreement between existing literature
 Identify patterns or trends in the literature
 Highlight gaps in previous research or questions left unanswered
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Why we need a literature review

 Define and limit the problem you are working on

 Place your study in a historical perspective
 Avoid unnecessary duplication of research
 Evaluate promising research methods
 Relate your findings to previous knowledge and suggest further research
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Plagiarism

 Purpose of a literature review is to analyze and synthesize ideas and findings of

OTHERS and use that information to support or justify your OWN research
 What is PLAGIARISM?
 Plagiarism is using / publishing of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions"
and the representation of them as one's own original work

http://www.academiccomposition.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/noplagiarism.png
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More forms of Plagiarism

 Turning in someone else's work as your own

 Copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
 Failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
 Giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
 Changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
 Copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work
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How to avoid plagiarism

 Whenever you use information from other authors, give credit to them
 Reference and Citation (In any kind of usage of other authors information)
 Quotation marks (If you directly copy and paste text from another authors work)
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An Example of a Literature Review
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Types of Sources for Literature review

 Journal Article
 Conference Proceedings
 Books
 Thesis and Dissertations
 Government reports / Specialized magazines

SHOULD BE PEER REVIEWED

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Peer Review

 Process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the

inspection of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing
this work is accepted/published
 When you are writing a literature review, make sure all the sources you refer to
get information, contains articles/papers which are peer reviewed (No Wikipedia,
No Personal Blogs)
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Guidelines to write a Literature Review

 Select an interested area

 Do an initial research to Narrow Down your topic
 Start searching for literature in selected area
 Summarize the literature
 Critically analyze the key ideas in literature
 Arrange the information in a logical order to build up an argument / research question
 AND
 Write with a purpose, a research problem in mind
 Select references that are only relevant to your work
 Establish relationships with different works and your own
 Write and rewrite
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Mind Map
Theories

Access
Management
Definitions

Security in cloud
Computing

Availability
Data security

Governance User Privacy

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References

 http://
jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/student/student_grad/docs/How_to_Write_an_Effective_Literature
_Review.pdf
 http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/literature-reviews/
 http://unimelb.libguides.com/lit_reviews
 http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism-101/what-is-plagiarism/