Performing a scientific literature review is an important step in both academic research and the development of new technology in industry. Simply put, the goal of such a review is to identify the top outstanding approaches for handling a particular problem or challenge -- the so-called state of the art. Your review will consist of a list of references to the significant papers in the area, plus some short narrative describing how they fit together. If the existing techniques are good enough, then they can simply be applied as described in the literature. If they are deficient, then an opportunity exists for novel research. A literature review may also include some landmark historical papers that give a sense of the development of work in a particular area.
How to Proceed
Keep your review focused on one topic or problem area -- e.g., edge detection, face tracking, texture synthesis, etc. This can be something you plan to present in class, or perhaps an area you are interested in investigating for a final project.
It is usually helpful to begin by reading one or more summary pieces on the field or problem in question. You may find this in a textbook, in Wikipedia, or elsewhere online. Ultimately you are looking for original papers rather than summaries, but these will help to orient you about the field and what to look for. Use them to get a general idea of major trends in the area. They may also contain references to a few actual articles that can get you started.
Once you have some feel for the topic, you can start to look at papers. Don't spend much time reading at first -- try to get a sense of relevance from the title, and if necessary read the abstract for clarification. You can find papers via the resources mentioned below, but also by looking in the references section of other papers.
One particularly useful type of paper you may find gives a summary of the current state of the art at the time of publication. This may appear in a "related work" section, or the entire paper may itself be a sort of literature review. Good review papers are valuable for the references they contain, but also because they help to place different works in the context of a larger framework.
As you go, keep track of the papers you have found. Sometimes you will want to remove ones from your original list as you discover more significant work elsewhere. Shoot for perhaps one or two dozen entries.
You will present your work as an annotated bibliography, with citations to each paper and a sentence or two describing their contribution and placing them in the larger context. Include an additional paragraph or two at the beginning or the end summarizing the entire picture of what you have learned.
Resources
In recent years, the number of online resources available to assist with reviews of the scientific literature in computer science has grown dramatically. Most newly published conference papers are available from the authors' web sites, and automatic indexing services have grown up that analyze the citation patterns between papers. This does not mean that a trip to the library will not be necessary, but the availability of online resources has grown to the point where it cannot be ignored either.
- Citation Indices
- One type of online resource is a citation index, such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate or CiteSeer. These allow you to search for keywords in the paper title, author names, etc. to find papers that may be relevant. They also allow you to search through the citation links to find other papers that have cited a particular one. The number of citations provides one indication of how influential a particular paper has been. Following citation links can also lead you to more recent work that improves on the state of the art.
- General Search Engines
- Although not specialized for scientific literature, general search engines can also be useful in your online search. If a paper is available online, searching for its exact title (using quotation marks) will usually lead you to it. A general search engine can also lead you to the web site of a paper author, which may have additional related papers or other information.
- Specialized Sites
- Certain web sites also contain hand-built databases of special interest for computer vision. Unfortunately, they tend to become out of date if the author stops updating them. Examples include CV Online, a list of most-cited papers, and the CV Homepage.
Keep in mind that when you find a paper that has been posted on a personal web page, it may or may not have undergone peer review (the standard for rigorous academic research). Some of the top organizations in computer vision are IEEE, ACM, and SPIE. Look for papers published in journals or conferences sponsored by these organizations, although others may also be perfectly acceptable.
Obviously, you do not have the time to read and understand all the papers published on a particular subject in the last twenty years. In many cases you may not be able to read more than the abstract without requesting a paper through interlibrary loan. Thus you must be selective in your efforts. When you find a new paper that looks interesting, scan the abstract to see if it is relevant. If it is, you can add it to your bibliography and look for other documents related to it, either those that cite it or those it cites. If not, back up and look elsewhere.
Try not to get bogged down in details as you go. Many papers deal with small modifications to existing algorithms. Unless the effects are dramatic, these are usually less interesting than papers that use a fundamentally different approach (unless of course they are the newest, most advanced result in the field). To get an accurate picture of the state of the art, you will want to see all the principle approaches to a particular problem. After all, the next big improvement may not come from the current leader.
To Submit
Your main deliverable for this assignment will be a list of perhaps a dozen references that you believe represent both the development and the current state of the art in the assigned topic. To accompany this you should write a short summary telling the story of how these papers relate to each other.
If you plan to include the literature review in your portfolio, you should also include a second piece that documents your approach as you proceed with the literature review. Keep track of the sources you consult, search terms used, and the papers you find at each stage of the review. In the end, you are to turn this into a written narrative explaining your search process. The description should be explicit enough that someone can duplicate your results. However, you do not need to exhaustively list every paper you looked at.