Internal talk on literature review process on 5th Feb, 2021.
Research is re-search. Good work don’t pop out in isolation, they build on top of ideas from before. Ideas are cheap and you can always find many ideas similar to yours if you dig in the past or the present. This changes the focus from the fantasyland perception of research to a more disciplined proces of searching for similarities and building differentiation in ideas.
We covered a few examples and anecdotes in the talk to elaborate the above points.
In an ongoing or check-pointed literature review process, the output is some representation of the knowledge collected from various sources in a structures that are easier for further consumption.
Living, annotated bibliographies for topics are good structures to keep output of literature reviews.
Here are few examples:
You might be interested in reading How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco for a ritualistic research workflow.
In the LaTeX world, standard way of representing bibliographies is using BibTeX. There are many good tutorials to get started with bibliographies. Overleaf has a guide here. This might make more sense after we cover LaTeX itself.
For our purposes, we are starting to maintain a team wide shared library.
We are using Zotero to manage bibliographies. Here is the group link. Ask @abhinav for invites.
We keep entries, books, articles, blogs, repositories, that we find interesting there with labels and notes in there. This is supposed to be the central place for keeping our researches for review and further citations.