One of they key reasons to why I feel it is important for a (Master’s) student to understand this aspect is because there is a strong tendency (from some students) to believe that “doing interviews is easy”. Such students tend to believe that they could write a thesis by asking to their external/company supervisor some questions. The overall philosophy is the following: “the thesis has a (research) question that I have to answer. If my external supervisor answers it for me and I write down the answer, my thesis is finished”.

Ok ok, perhaps I am exaggerating, but I guess you can grasp the idea here and why it is important to understand when you should use interviews for your thesis. Clearly, if you tend to have the mindset that I described above, there is not much that I can do for helping you.

In information management (IM) a theory usually belongs to one of the following categories:

• Variance Theory: Focus on why something is happening
• Process Theory : Focus on how something is happening
• Taxonomy Theory: Categorize and classify what is happening
• System Theory: Components that a part of a system can be better understood in the context of the all system
• Design Science Theory: Develop and validate knowledge in a prescriptive manner

According to Wikipedia, a case study refers to an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case (or cases) within a real-world context. Case studies are a particular way to validate a Variance Theory (most of the time) or a Taxonomy, or (eventually) a Process theory. In other words, you want to understand relationships between concepts that are part of your theory.

The above mentioned theories are usually expressed as relationships among constructs. A construct is a theoretical concept, theme, or idea based on empirical observations. It’s a variable that’s usually not directly measurable. If you want to know more please consider looking at what is a construct from a philosophical point of view and the importance of construct validity.

Not all case studies are suitable for being conducted using interviews; other data collection methods can be used, too. You should consider using interviews in a situation where your research question can best be answered with detailed verbal data reflecting the perspectives and experiences of a small sample of individuals. Moreover, you should not conduct interviews to have your participants answer your research question. A research question is not something you ask from your interviewees, it is something you ask from your data consisting of interviews.

In other words, if you want to use a case study approach using interviews, you need to be sure of the following:

1. Your constructs cannot be measured in a quantitative way
2. Nobody has explored before the definitions of the constructs that could be a part of your theory
3. There is a lack of previous qualitative and quantitative studies and thus, an explorative approach is needed

Note that all the points imply that you will conduct a preliminary literature review for ensuring that a different approach can not be used and for defining the research gap that you will fill. By doing that you will observe that many of your ideas should probably be validated in a different manner than using interviews.

Should you use an interview-based case study for your thesis? It depends and a case study is not synonymous of interviews. In many cases, an interview-based investigation is suitable if you do not have any other way to prove your theory/hypothesis or answer your research question. What I mentioned here is just the tip of the iceberg and if you want to pursue a research following a case study approach (that uses interviews), I encourage you to watch the following lecture by Dr. Amiri:

You may find yourself in a situation where (i) after reading this post, (ii) performing your preliminary literature review, and (iii) watching the video above you still believe that an interview-based case study is the most appropriate approach. The next steps that you need to consider include considering (a) how to collect your data, (b) how to structure your interviews and (c) how to analyze your data. Once you have done all of that you should be able to smile after looking at the image below!

Finally, I would suggest to check this article from Dr. Toivonen where she discusses quality in qualitative research and gives a few tips for improving your work.

Should you use an #interview based #casestudy for your #Thesis ? A simple checklist. #thesiswriting
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Note from Dr. Toivonen: You don’t need to consider interviews and case studies as the last option only after you’re sure that your research question cannot be answered in a quantitative manner. Qualitative and quantitative approaches can also co-exist and enrich each other. However, I would recommend you not treating interviews as “the easy way out” from your thesis journey; conducting an interview study well is time consuming and complicated. I would also like to point out that replicating previous interview-based studies is possible in qualitative research, but that is a challenging endeavor because you have to formulate your research question carefully and do nuanced, sophisticated comparisons. Replicating does not mean repeating, and therefore, is best left for more experienced researchers at the PhD level and beyond.

This article (Should You Use a Case Study for your Thesis in Information Management?) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of post at the following links:

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

External supervisor: Javed Khan

Business Needs

1. Improving the visibility of data in a global manufacturer’s head office. Current businesses have a plethora of data and analytics, critical for strategic, tactical and operational decision-making. Interactive displays in an office can support that decision making process. For this assignment you will investigate user needs of senior management in Sappi’s head office. Based on that investigation you will design and implement dashboards to be displayed in a high-tech interactive display in Sappi’s head office in Brussels, Belgium.
2. Improving everyday work-related chores. In this assignment you will investigate how office workers deal with IT systems for completing chores such as filling expenses. Based on that investigation you will propose a system to make such processes more efficient.

The Horizon Europe funding creates opportunities for Sappi to both fund and solve, through collaborations with other complementing organizations. However, in our experience in trying to partner with other organizations to pursue funding on digital initiatives, we have found a luck of detailed use-cases, which would the basis of filtering the proposed calls for funding.

Main Activities

• Conduct user research such as interviews and contextual inquiry.
• Qualitative and quantitative analysis.
• Design of dashboards for semi-public, interactive displays.
• Implementation of dashboards for semi-public, interactive displays.
• Investigation of modern IT systems.

Success Metrics

1. Dashboards are user-friendly and informative,
2. User findings are thorough, actionable and convincing,
3. Suggestions for improvements are actionable and convincing,
4. student’s attitude: quick response time, proactiveness and independence.

Company and Team

The internship will take place within the Digital Transformation (DT) team of Sappi Europe, in Brussels, Belgium.

Sappi is a global company focused on providing dissolving pulp, paper pulp, paper-based and biorefinery solutions to its customers in over 150 countries. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Sappi Europe is the leading European producer and supplier of coated fine paper, packaging and specialty papers.

More about the company at: https://www.sappi.com/

Company coach

Dr.ir. Javed Khan is Head of UX in Sappi. Furthermore, he serves as an associate editor at the Behavior and Information Technology journal. Javed holds a PhD. and a P.D.Eng. degree from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and a MSc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras. In the past he held the position (tenured) of assistant professor at TU/e’s department of Industrial Design and before that of senior lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences. Finally, he gained industrial R&D experience, in design and HCI research positions, at Philips Research, Vodafone and Greece’s Computer Technology Institute.

More about the coach at: http://khan.gr/

Master #thesis in #DigitalTransformation in SAPPI: a global manufacturer of sustainable materials at TiU.
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For a complete list of available thesis please visit the following link:
https://francescolelli.info/thesis/

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A navigation test is important for the following two reasons:

• It is hard to structure writing coherently: It hardly happens at the first attempt. Therefore, a proper assessment of the consistency of the structure of your manuscript can help to identify areas of improvement as well as critically reassess what has been written.
• So far you probably wrote your thesis (following an IMRaD structure) thinking that your reader will read it from the beginning to the end. Also this will happen, it is usually not the first way your reader will approach your masterpiece. Probably he/she will jump around in search of information in order to get a feeling of what you did and only afterwards will decide to read it in a more complete manner.

What I am suggesting is a test that can assess the status of your work from the point of view of the reader and the aspects described before. You can do this navigation test alone but it works better if you are doing it with a friend, maybe with a fellow student that is familiar with your field of study but not with your thesis.

The test is relatively simple but requires you to take notes and keep a humble attitude as you will find unexpected surprises. These are the steps:

1. Meet with a friend that is familiar with your field of study but not with your work.
2. After a drink of their choosing, give him/her your thesis outline (the index that contains the subsections as well). Make sure that each subsection has the pictures and the tables that you would like to have in your final thesis. Alternatively, you can share your entire work but make sure that he/she will not spend more than 10 minutes browsing the document.
3. Tell him/her that you will ask her a few questions and that he/she can use the manuscript for answering. He/she will not have to retrieve the complete answer but tell you to which section(s) he/she will jump to search for more information.
4. Take notes on how they react to the questions and the sections they decide to visit. You should not give any suggestions and you should repeat this process for each question.

Here you can find an initial set of questions:

• What it this thesis about?
• What is the research question?
• Did you collect your own data or use an existing dataset?
• What kind of methodology did you use for validating your research questions?
• How can you reuse my data for your own thesis/research?
• Can this research be considered concluded or is further research needed?
• Who else has done research in a similar topic?

If you have time, you can also ask the following questions:

• What can you learn if you read the thesis?
• How can you get access to my data?
• What code/tool did I use for analyzing my data?
• Does this thesis have industrial relevance?
• Did you do an internship in conjunction of this thesis?
• If someone does not have time to read the whole thesis, can you give this person a short description of it? (Follow up question: If someone already read the executive summary, can you give them a short version of the thesis that is a bit longer than the summary?

Now it is time to check your notes and critically assess (with or without the help of your friend) the following points:

• How easy was it for him/her to find the answers?
• Was the selected section(s) the most appropriate one? Why?
• Does the text of the selected section(s) deliver(s) the answer in a simple and complete manner?
• Do the identified sections live up to other expectations of the reader?

Remember that you are suppose to take the perspective of your friend. They were confronted for the first time with your thesis and this is what they understood.

I am sure that this exercise will give you the opportunity to critically reflect on your work and implement the proper corrective actions. If you have the time, you can repeat the exercise with a different friend.

The Navigation Test: a simple test that can improve the quality of your #writing in you #Thesis or scientific #paper. #writingtips
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1: Outline and indexes

The structure of your document plays an important role and is often the first thing that your reader checks. Therefore, it is your chance to make a good impression. Consider the first level index and the second level index separately.

• First level index: make sure that it follows a variation of the IMRaD structure and consider making an outline of the whole manuscript in the first chapter. Take all the space that you need, in particular if you are not bounded by word limits. Make a dedicated section in Chapter 1 with a bullet list, one for each chapter, appendix included. In addition, describe the content in 1-3 sentences.
• Second level index: look at the title of each chapter and each section and imagine that they are the only thing that will be read of your thesis. How easy is it to follow the story that they are telling? Is the story and the logic easy to grasp or is something missing? Should you merge together or divide one or more sections?

2: Table and pictures

Tables and pictures are also part of this writing rules checklist. As matter of fact, after the index, they are the second thing that will be noticed by your reader and are as important as your outline. Each table and picture should have a text description. No exception. In addition, when describing these items consider the following “3 layers” of comments:

• Layer 1: present the obvious. Imagine describing a table to a blind person: What is in the x? What is in the y? What is the meaning of each column of the table?
• Layer 2: present what is objective. In other words, present the facts. Can we observe a correlation between X and Y? Is A greater than B?
• Layer 3: present what is logical. In other words, present your interpretation of the facts. What can we conclude from the fact that A is greater than B? What are the implications of X and Y being correlated? Here you can be moderately speculative and give your best, educated guess.

Whenever possible, make your own pictures (the same applies to tables) instead of reusing the pictures that you find in other papers. This does not imply that you have to “regenerate” the same pictures. Re-elaborate them and make sure that they represent your own original thinking. If you end up using a picture or table that has been published in another paper or book, give credit correctly.

In addition, assuming that you already did the work mentioned at the first point of this article, look at the table and the title in conjunction with the subsection where they are presented. Do they match well? Do they complement each other?

3: Bullet Lists

Bullet lists are very important in your scientific report. You can use them to simplify and structure the text that you are writing. Using bullet lists will make sections become more logically coherent. At the same time, you should resist the urge to create sections that contain only bullet lists. They should always be surrounded by “plain text” that describes why that particular list/categorization is important. If you find yourself in some sort of “writer’s block”, start by introducing the bullet list and then provide its point.

4: Appendixes

The thesis should contain all the material that is necessary for documenting your scientific claims. At the same time, there is always some preparatory work or test work that you performed for initial validation of your ideas or to clarify to yourself the intermediate steps. Appendixes are perfect places for this: Carefully assess all the material that you have produced to your thesis and try to see how it could be packaged in an appendix. In other words, if you have done the work and it is some how related to the main claims of your thesis, why not show it? At the same time, you should consider an appendix like any other chapter and not a place where to park pictures and tables. Consequently, all the previous remarks of this article apply to them as well. In addition, every appendix must be refereed in one or more chapter of your thesis for further explanation.

5: No empty section allowed

This point is relatively simple and clear: no empty sections in your thesis. In other words: (for example) do not start a chapter with “section 2.1” but use the section “2.0” for describing what the chapter is about. Maybe you can give an outline of the follow-up sections here?

6: Consider a grammar check, style check and plagiarism check

A plagiarism check is the process of locating instances of plagiarism or copyright infringement within a work or document. There are several resources freely available in the internet: Use one or two. Make sure that the content of the chapters and the appendixes is not flagged. However, you should not worry about references and/or portions of code.

In addition, you can easily find tools in the internet that check style and grammar, and some may also be available at your library. I would suggest you to spend a few hours with them and try to reflect on the changes that they recommend. Consider their output as an opinion and an opportunity to reflect on how you wrote certain aspects of your work. Not all the suggestions are good, but some may be worth incorporating.

A Final comment on writing rules and next steps

Reflecting on the writing rules presented in this article will help you in structuring your work and making it more accessible to your reader. I would encourage to implement all of them and take a 24h break from writing. Then, you can revisit these points one more time and see if you still would like to make some changes. After a couple of iterations I would suggest to perform a “navigability test” as described in this article.

Simple #writing rules that can improve the quality of your #Thesis or scientific #paper. #writingtips
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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

Co-Supervisor: Second Reader will be assigned based on the finalization of the proposal from the student.

What is the value of your website for an SME or a professional service? Internet as a selling channel is a vastly explored domain. However, a set of business may not have a direct benefit from this channel as they require a more personal touch or are intrinsically “offline businesses”. That is the case of babysitters, lawyers, tailors, thinkers, property managers, cleaners, etc. These professions may advertise their presence in Internet; however, most of the relationship evolve offline in a personal manner.

This thesis proposal intends to evaluate and quantify the benefit of an online presence for such businesses and the effect that a public profile may have in establishing the trust that is needed to engage in a constructive relationship.

This project does not involve an internship. Instead, it will try to have a high academic relevance and theoretical contribution and, based on the quality of your work the candidate may be able to publish the results in the proceedings and scientific journals.

Are you curious and would like to know more?

This video (courtesy of google) will give you an overview of the landscape:

Full list of videos available here:

If you are curious and you what to know more about the topic, I recommend you the following:

• Watch some of the videos of the Digital Garage channel of Google. You will get familiar of the landscape
• A few non intuitive keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: Consumer trust, internet presence, B2C, Offline Shopping, Social Presence, Online Shopping, Shopping Behavior.

Would you like to know how some scholars are approaching this problem? Here you can find some initial pointers for a more exhaustive research:

• The Determinants and Consequences of Consumer Trust in e-retailing: a conceptual Framework.
• Past purchase and intention to purchase in e‐commerce: The mediation of social presence and trust
• Exploring online and offline shopping motivational values in Malaysia
• Multi-channel consumer perceptions

Suggested methodology: you are probably going to build a survey

Tools: a non-exhaustive list of tools that you may want to consider using includes R, SPSS, Google Forms, Qualtrics, Excel, etc.

Data: you will build your own dataset and will give you the opportunity to take advantage of open science best practices.

If you are interested in the topic, do not hesitate to contact me for more information. Please contact Francesco Lelli.

The post Understanding the Importance of an Internet Presence for Offline Professional Services: Thesis Proposal appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

You may receive support from proper offices at the university, open source initiatives, as well as from the web. Here, I will share my favorite set of resources. Some are strictly related to the university where I am currently working, however, many institutions offer similar services.

Support for writing and related work:

• Universities have dedicated facilities (in Tilburg it is called Scriptorium) to help with writing assignments, such as a paper, a report, or your thesis. These facilities offer individual support for writing in both the language of your bachelor/master’s thesis (whether it is Dutch, French, Finnish, or something else) and English. You can also get help with searching for relevant background literature, consulting specific databases, and with questions about quoting and source referencing. Do not misunderstand me, they will not do the work for you but they can provide you with guidance and feedback.
• Libraries have a collection of best practices on how to reference sources in the proper manner and avoid plagiarism. Ref Cite is the one of the Library of Tilburg University: It is a self-study tutorial explaining the why and how of working with sources in academic writing.
• Libraries (here you can find the link to the one of TiU) are also the natural go-to place for retrieving material for your thesis. Nowadays your library is probably digital and offers your remote access via dedicated VPN. Nevertheless, your resources may also be available in paper format.

Support for Software and IT in General

• Some software is expensive, some is difficult to configure, and some has special licenses for students/researchers/faculties member. The IT support (here the link to the one in TiU) may help you in navigating this labyrinth and solve the various software (and hardware) related issues.
• Data are an important ingredient for your thesis. Your library (link again to the TiU one) may have access to particular packages (datasets) that are not available in a common setting.
• Data are also available in the web. Possible sources include the one mentioned in this post as well the datasets that I recently released.

IT Resources Offered for Free to Students

Being a student is (sometimes) an asset. Many companies and no-profit associations offer special support to students for experimenting and conducting their researches. Here there are two that I believe should be mentioned:

• Amazon Education: offers for free both classes as well as free computing resources for practicing cloud computing and related skills.
• GithHub education pack: offers an entire set of IT based services as well as the GithHub pro version for free to students that apply for this program.

Online Communities in the Web

Online communities may also be a source of support, mentorship, and exchange of ideas. Here are two that you should consider joining:

• StackeXchange (here you can see my profile) contains many communities that can be helpful for programming, configuring applications, as well as handling research in general.
• AskAcademia in Reddit is also a nice (virtual) place for exchanging opinions of academia-related issues.

Problems in Organizing Your Time and Delays

Deviation from what is originally expected is more common than you can imagine. Universities usually offer dedicated facilities for covering these problems. In TiU, this is the case of the Dean of Students. This is where you can find tailored support in case personal circumstances cause unforeseen problems for you. You can also develop a personal roadmap or working/study schedule.

Personal Coaching and Mental Health in General

Let’s face it, Covid times are not easy for anybody. In this respect, universities are organizing services that are supporting the mental health of students and staff. If you are experiencing difficulties in focusing, you may contact a specialized service (again, here you can find the one of TiU as an example) that can offer tailored support for your specific issue.

Other Online Resources for Your Thesis

A bit of self-promotion here. I am curating a few guides with the aim of offering quick (but effective) tips and suggestions for delivering a good thesis. In particular, I would suggest you to look at:

• A curated set of articles for improving the various aspects of your thesis
• A curated set of articles for moving from “Script Programming” to Object Oriented Programming.

Your #Thesis will benefit from all the help that it can get. Here you can find who can help you and how.
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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

Have you ever received an eMail from a friend proposing a vacation to Venice and 30 second later you stumble into an advertisement proposing cheap flights or hotels for that very same destination?  Welcome to the world of Natural Language Processing (NLP).

This thesis will investigate the limits that machines have in processing and understanding colloquial conversations. If you are curious to know what can actually be automatized by Artificial Intelligence this thesis is for you.

You will be able to touch with your own hands the technological and business limits that this technology is facing in its adoption into our everyday life as well as propose your personal ideas for improving the present state of the art.

Moreover, you will have the opportunity to master techniques of NLP for parsing and extracting semantic information from any kind of text.

Your claims will be validated using popular NLP libraries (yes, you will have to write a few line of code!) using an existing dataset as benchmark (no, you do not have to collect data!).

 If you are curious and you what to know more about the topic, I recommend you the following:

• A generic article in Wikipedia about Natural Language Processing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing
• Watch this YouTube video (knowledge of Python will help you in understanding it)

• A few keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: natural language processing, NLP topic modelling, natural language processing interview, natural language processing data.

This project does not involve an internship. Instead, it will try to have a high academic relevance and theoretical contribution and, based on the quality of your work the candidate may be able to publish the results in the proceedings and scientific journals. If this topic triggers your intellectual curiosity, let me know.

If you are interested in the topic, do not hesitate to contact us for more information.

The post Natural Language Processing for Unstructured Text in Colloquial Conversations appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

Adopting healthy scientific practices is essential for conducting good quality research. This may be intuitive but it is hard to achieve and does not happen naturally. This video from the Royal Society introduces the problem:

The term “replication crisis” emphasizes that replication, a corner stone in science, is often considered of secondary importance. If we want to fight this phenomena it is important to conduct research using practices that promote the possibility to do that.

The open science movement not only offers you a way to get credited for your work (see this post on open access for more), but also tries to solve the problem of replicability. It takes into account several aspects at the level of researchers, scientific venues, funding organizations, etc.

In this article, we will focus on aspects related to the way research is conducted and the direct implications (and advantages) for your thesis.

I am assuming that you are not interested in falsifying your data or following any other intentional malpractices. In case you wonder, if you get caught, you could face serious consequences that range from immediate nullification of your thesis to expulsion and/or immediate termination of your internship.

As a single researcher (or small group of researchers) your attention should go towards offering to other scientists the possibility to access the data that you used for the analysis as well as your procedures. This video explain in a funny way why:

In other words, these are a set of good research practices that you should take into account:

• Carefully describe the procedures that you followed for obtaining the data.
• Make your data publicly available so that other scientists can check what you are doing. This includes your mentor and your second reader.
• Document each step of the process in order to be able to share this information with fellow researchers.
• Disclose the meaning of each field in the data.
• Disclose and share the programming code that you used for developing the data as well as the analysis.

Adopting these practices has several direct benefits:

• Your supervisors and/or reviewers will be positively impressed and predispose towards a higher grade.
• You will obtain a (very) good grade independently from your findings. In fact, your thesis is not about your findings: Showing you capability to follow the scientific method is way more important.
• Your work could, starting from your data, be published in a relatively easy manner as a tangible follow up of your thesis. Thus, differentiating your CV from other graduated students.
• A fellow student could decide to continue your work. Thus, you will be able to leave something tangible after you, instead of having your thesis completely forgotten.

In a nutshell, the bottom line is that good research practices will give you a better grade.

In this article, I limited myself to describing the scientific practices that a single individual should follow in pursuing his/her thesis. Adopting a more transparent approach clearly has several benefits and a direct implication on your grade. However, the problem of replicability is bigger than it may look like from this post. It is taken into serious consideration by the entire scientific community. In case you are interested in knowing more, this video gives you a general (and insightful) view on the problem:

#good #research practices like the one promoted by #OpenScience and #OpenData lead to better grades for your #Thesis as well as to a better #Science and more visibility of your work via #openaccess.
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I am pretty sure that every (master) thesis will finish with its defense (my last minute recommendations) and that will require you to give a small presentation.

This video is an interesting talk from Patrick Winston on the topic:

Here are the main takeovers:

• Rules of Engagement: Both for the speaker and for the audience, staying away from their laptop and cellphone is crucial. We can do only one thing at a time. Distractions will lower the amount of concepts and information that you will be able to process. These devices are continually tempting us, but as a member of the audience, offer your full attention to the speaker. This is probably the best thing that you can do in order to profit from the talk.

• How to Start: Some speakers prefer begin their talk with a joke, some by giving the audience a promise of what they will benefit from the speech. I would focus on underlining the benefit that your audience may gain in listening to you.
  
• Four Sample Heuristics for your talk: (i) “Cycle around” your topic; (ii) build a fence around your idea in order to avoid confusion and make it more distinguishable from other ideas; (iii) use “verbal punctuation” to help people get back to the talk; (iv) ask questions that are not obvious nor too hard.
  
• The Tools: Time and place. You should favor late in the morning. The ideal place is a well lit too that is neither too crowded nor to empty. Inspect the location where you will be speaking beforehand if you have the chance
  
• The Tools: Boards, props, and slides. These tools have features that can help your communication and make your talk more interesting and dynamic. Slides deserve a bit more attention; and here, there are a few pointers: (i) Don’t use too many words; (ii) having a colorful power point slide background is useless; (iii) stay physically close to the slides; (iv) 40-50 is the reasonable size for the fonts in the slides; (v) avoid (laser) pointers unless is strictly needed; (vi) make sure your content is digestible and not too complex or otherwise heavy.
  
• Informing: Promise, Inspiration, How To Think. A talk should be finetuned for the audience that you have in front of you. However two important and evergreen ingredients are (i) “passion” when delivering your message and (ii) storytelling for framing your message.
  
• Persuading: Oral Exams, Job Talks, Becoming Famous. Focus on showing what you have done and present your vision in 5 minutes. As for the rest, watch the talk above ;-). Making sure your presentations includes a symbol (like a logo), a slogan, and a surprise (like overdelivering on your promise you made at the beginning of your talk), can all help in delivering your message effectively. Make sure you use all these elements properly and glue them onto your story.
  
• How to Stop: Final Slide, Final Words. Instead of a general summary, focus on your contribution to the big picture.
  
• Final Words: Joke, Thank You, Examples. In the end, the setting changes. Show your appreciation for the audience in a more unique and creative way than just blurting out a “thank you” at the end. Why not ending with a joke?

The #art and the #skills of #speaking and giving a #presentation: a few #tip for your #improvement in #publicspeaking
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• Writing scientific papers
• Writing position reports in a non-academic job
• Writing your Bachelor/Master/PhD thesis

Here, you will find a collection of resources that should help you in addressing your scholarly needs.

Not All Publications Are Equal

Yes, quality matters. I am talking about both (i) the quality of a venue/journal and (ii) the quality of a paper published in the particular venue/journal.

In talking about a venue you want to consider impact factor, self-citation ratio and indexing of the venue as some key heuristics for understanding the “prestige” of the venue. If you have trouble in understanding the meaning of these terms, I described these aspects extensively in one of my recent articles that talks about understanding scientific venues. I also presented what white papers are and how you should consider them in your research.

You have to be aware of the quality of a publication per se and independently from where it has been published. It is particularly important for saving time as well as for being able to read works that can actually help you in solving your problem instead of making it more complicated. Over time, every scientist develops his/her heuristics and in this article I described mine. In a nutshell, it is about looking at the citations of the article, its abstract, the venue, and the authors.

Much more can be said about the topic. This is an extensive lecture series from the University of Washington. If you are curious, you can learn some of the dynamics of scientific publishing. The title “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data” gives you a good idea of the content.

Related Work/Literature Review and Active Reading

Do not limit yourself to only passive reading of scientific papers: instead, follow an active reading approach. In particular, you should take into account that scientific articles follow an  IMRaD structure. It stands for Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion. In a recent article, I discussed how to take advantage of that structure for reading scientific papers quickly and effectively.

It is also important to always keep in mind the reason why you are doing a related work/literature review and act accordingly. Maybe you are trying to understand a problem or are trying to find the proper methodology for solving a clear problem. Your reading approach should be finetuned for the particular goal, and in this article you can find suggestions for taking advantage of a literature review for your research. Starting from asking yourself “why should I read this paper?”.

Leverage Proper Tools for Organizing Your Work

The more you will read, in particular if you will practice active reading, the more you will need to effectively organize your work. You should start organizing your work early on, when you have not yet accumulated an unmanageable amount of scientific resources. Otherwise, the inertia will cost you an unbearable amount of time.

There are dedicated tools for this task. In this article, I describe how you could organize your references using specific features of Microsoft words. There are several other tools like Mendeley and Citeulike that could help you in reducing the complexity of managing a large amount of resources.

Other Practical Aspects for a Literature Review:

In this video, Javed Vasillis presents a practical approach for conducting a literature review with a focus on the HCI domain.

However, many of the suggestions are valid for every domain of research. In particular, how to use the keywords of scientific papers as well as scientific research engines.

In this video, Shady Attia presents his view on how to conduct a literature review.

In addition, in case you are doing a literature review for non-scientific purposes or for the purpose of conducting an assignment, you may want to watch this video. You will find a quick and effective approach for this task.

However, in case you are not writing a company report or a white paper I would encourage you to take a more formal approach as described in this article and in the other videos. If your goal is to produce a (relatively) quick deliverable for an assignment you may want to consider it.

A collection of resources of conducting a Related Work (or #Literature #Review or #survey #Paper). Take advantage of #active reading and the dynamics of #scientific #writing.
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In Summary

Reading a good literature review (or related work or survey paper, call it in the way you prefer) can help you in understanding a problem and in providing you with clear ideas on how to solve a particular challenge. Writing an outstanding literature review can help you in positioning yourself as an expert in a field. They key is leveraging the structure of scientific papers, using an active reading approach, as well as using tools that can help you manage the increasing complexity.

This article (Related Work/Literature Review/Survey Paper: a collection of resources) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of posts at the following links:

The post Related Work/Literature Review/Survey Paper: A Collection of Resources appeared first on Francesco Lelli.