Tony Tang bio photo

Tony Tang

I'm an Associate Professor in the School of Computer and Information Systems at the Singapore Management University. I'm passionate about Human-Computer Interaction and other weird things.

Related Work Tutorial Exercise

Print out and read the Abstract, Introduction and Related Work sections of each of the following papers:

Goals:

What are they talking about in the related work section?
What are they trying to do in the related work section?
How are these related work sections different from one another (aside from topic)?

Set up:

mCommerce: What is the relationship between the introduction and related work? [actual content/ideas]
Family Window: What is the relationship between the introduction and related work? [actual content/ideas]

Tasks:

Summarize each paragraph in a sentence: what are they saying?
Look at each subsection: what are they trying to do here? How are they doing it?
How do they treat each individual piece of literature?
How do they treat each individual idea?

++ How do they talk about what they plan on doing?

Show you are knowledgeable [about the area, and what influences you]
Provide a reader with sufficient understanding of the problem/solution space to interpret the rest of your work
Shows how others have tackled similar problems; may show how others have applied a similar approach
Shows things that are in a related space
Provides a synthesis of literature – a new framework for interpreting and understanding others’ work

Types Literature Reviews (increasing sophistication)

annotated bibliography
by summaries of project/paper
by history [hard if field is old]
by concepts and ideas

Ways things are linked

Addressing a similar problem
Used a similar approach
Comparative based on the obvious question
Comparative based on a question that you derive later (secondary use)

Common Mistakes

Too little / much
Aimless – what is absolutely important for the reader to really know, otherwise they would either (a) be completely lost, or (b) think you don’t know what you’re talking about
Avoids synthesis – doesn’t tell us anything aside from a brief summary of each paper

Strategy 1: Deep Method

Problem, approach, lessons, evaluation, contribution for each paper (5 sentences)
Determine what ideas/themes relate based on these summaries

Strategy 2: Outcomes-based Method

Write two sentences for each paper that you have read – what are the lessons from that work, how is the system/study different from your own; don’t group them
Group things according to similar topics

Resources: