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System Integration |
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Dedicated to the dissemination of System Integration information |
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My Dissertation - Sixth Week of Study |
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Dates: 9.3.2007 to 15.3.2007
This week I have been concentrating on the literature search and completing the plan up to, and including, TMA02. TMA02 is due on 27.3.07 so, because I work full time, means I will have to have it completed by next Sunday (the 25th).
The point of the literature search is to ensure you know what the current state of the subject area, know what is being said and what hasn’t been said. You can’t do a dissertation in isolation; you need to use the work of others to ensure you add to the ‘body of knowledge’.
The problem with the literature search, or at least what I find difficulty with, is finding up to date refereed papers. By definition there is always going to be a time lag, the author needs to research his, or her, subject, write the paper, submit it to the relevant organisation, only then will people, if it gets published, comment on it. This can take some time, in the case of a PhD thesis this can be up to 3 or 4 years. There are conferences where all the papers are peer reviewed but you will always get a delay of some sort.
The most up to date papers are what get published in magazines, on web pages, etc. The chances are these won’t be peer reviewed. I asked about what type of paper it was possible to cite in my dissertation, I was told a mixture of refereed\non-refereed papers would be OK but their should be an emphasis on peer reviewed papers.
Some magazines are peer reviewed; anything the IEEE publishes is so this is a good source of relatively modern, peer reviewed, papers.
Another problem is how you keep a track of the citations you use. I found out about various citation indexing programs but in the end I used Microsoft Excel. I make a note of the author, date and place of publication etc, put a hyperlink in to the actual document and that’s my system - it works OK for me.
Last Week Next Week
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