Literature Review

In any science discipline, a typical research cycle always starts with a literature search to find out what work has previously been done. This is very important, especially for our projects!

Databases

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System

This database allows you to search for papers, authors with various options of how to sort the search results. You can download papers from this database.

Web of Science

Need to be at a university campus to access, but very comprehensive source.

Keeping Track of Your Literature Sources

When undertaking any literature search, it is a good idea to keep a database of any papers, bib files and pdfs.

You can put the information into an Excel sheet with sub-headings:

Search term
Title
Author (s)
Year
BibTag
BibTex
Website
Downloaded
Publication
Abstract

Continuing the Literature Search

Now that you have 1 paper you know want to find papers which are related to it-there are two things you need to look at: references in the paper (lets call it paper X) and citations. “References” are the papers which paper X has been based upon. Citations are papers which have used paper X as inspiration/starting point for their study.

In your spreadsheet, you now want to create two new columns: 1 for “references chased” and 1 for “citations chased”: simply type YES/NO as appropriate. I.e starting with paper X if you have then inputted all the referenced papers from it into your spreadsheet you can put this column as “Yes”.

This is where I would suggest that you work as a team to share the work out: I.e each have a spreadsheet and then combine them together.

As a caveat: for each paper references/cited think about if it is relevant or not-dicuss in group if not sure or put on list to email to me.

With literature searches you will find that:

1. They tend to expand (blow up!) very quickly: starting with paper X you may get 8 papers and then from each of those 8 papers you will get another 8.