Method for literature review on PostgraduateForum.com

Method for literature review

escard
13 years ago

Hello everyone

I am just new here and started my PhD recently about fault tolerant control. I am really concerned about the method I can take for doing literature review. As I read through each paper, I normally wrote down some dot points about its relevance to my topic and the actual concept discussed. But when the number of papers getting large, I feel it is hard to remember the content I have read. Would you care to share your experience and methods during this stage?

Also, at this stage, if you come across some papers that you just don't understand its mathematical proves but have a brief understanding of the concept, would you try to study it until you understand entirely or you can leave it for later stages? Is it possible to ask your supervisor? I know as PhD student, we suppose to do quit a bit self study, I am just wondering what kind of questions should we ask and what sort questions we should find out by our own?

Thanks for your reply in advance.

dgi
13 years ago

Quote From escard:

Hello everyone

I am just new here and started my PhD recently about fault tolerant control. I am really concerned about the method I can take for doing literature review. As I read through each paper, I normally wrote down some dot points about its relevance to my topic and the actual concept discussed. But when the number of papers getting large, I feel it is hard to remember the content I have read. Would you care to share your experience and methods during this stage?

Also, at this stage, if you come across some papers that you just don't understand its mathematical proves but have a brief understanding of the concept, would you try to study it until you understand entirely or you can leave it for later stages? Is it possible to ask your supervisor? I know as PhD student, we suppose to do quit a bit self study, I am just wondering what kind of questions should we ask and what sort questions we should find out by our own?

Thanks for your reply in advance.

Hi Escard,

I'm not sure I understand the part about remembering paper's content...I have your very same approach to literature and think the whole idea about writing down dot points is that so you do NOT have to memorize all content :)

Concerning the second part, I would suggest you look for main concepts to begin with, the M&M sections are important in later stages (well, unless you are a statistician/mathematician and/or your work is of methodological nature).

What you can ask to your sup is of course highly dependent on you, him and what relationship you have. Personally, I think a good supervisor should be able and willing to accept all kind of questions if they matter to the students.