Part 1: Basics of Decent Literature Review- Conference Articles

#PDF #SGS #LiteratureReview

Important components of conducting research: Read, Processes, and Comprehend.

Dear LGPR Candidates:

A literature review is the first critical step in establishing the foundation and rationale for one's research. After all, research demands the investment of one’s most valuable resource—time. Once time is spent, it can never be regained. In this multipart series we are introducing some basics of literature that arise from conferences.

A well-conducted literature review helps address Six key questions, such as:

1. What problem is your research attempting to solve?

2. What has already been done in this area?

3. What gaps or overlooked aspects exist in previous studies?

4. Is there a specific reason why certain methods were omitted by other researchers?

5. How does your research contribute to society at large?

6. What key insights should readers take away from your work?

By answering these questions, a literature review not only strengthens the foundation of your research but also ensures its relevance and impact. Remember the above "six key questions", we will use them in the later part of this article.

During the first LGPR SGS conference, the researchers were asked to present the identified problem statement, literature review, and knowledge gaps pertaining to the topic of their research.

All the sessions were recorded, and it was observed that the majority of researchers were engaging with the wrong type of literature or relying on sources that could be considered substandard for the aforementioned task.

This article is meant to serve as a basic guideline for addressing the task at hand. Please understand that if we find poorly drafted conference proceedings articles, then there will be multiple rounds of review until the expected standard is achieved.

Here is a list of literature sources that you should avoid:

Source: Articles from E3S Web of Conferences / Bio Web of Conferences franchise. https://www.webofconferences.org

Reason: Presumably this outlet began as a high quality affair. However, articles appearing in this outlet in the past 18 months is a tell tale of commercial greed overpowering the editorial processes.

Notable Examples:

[1] Kaur, H., Kumar, B., Mahna, J., Purve, D., Gond, N., & Ali, M. S. (2024). Campus Connect Revolutionizing Departmental Collaboration and Engagement. In E3S Web of Conferences (Vol. 556, p. 01003). EDP Sciences.https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202455601003

[2] Saluja, R., Shukla, M., Kaur, G., & Rana, P. (2024). Novel CNN Integration with Pre-Trained model for Enhanced Plant Disease Detection. In E3S Web of Conferences (Vol. 556, p. 01005). EDP Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202455601005

[3] Ismail, E. R., El-Mahdy, G. M., Ibrahim, A. H., & Daoud, A. O. (2022). Towards automated construction for safe disposal of materials waste in the Egyptian construction industry. In E3S Web of Conferences (Vol. 347, p. 02010). EDP Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202234702010

[4] Harb, S., ElHaggar, S. M., & Sewilam, H. (2019). Developing sustainable school guidelines: the case of Egypt. In E3S Web of Conferences (Vol. 96, p. 03004). EDP Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/20199603004

[5] Anouar, M., & Larbi, S. (2022). A new PIFA antenna for future mobile and wireless communication. In E3S Web of Conferences (Vol. 351, p. 01085). EDP Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202235101085

[6] Andre, H., Seyepa, T. P. T., Luthfi, A., Fitrah, R. A., Zaky, T., & Ramlee, R. A. (2023). Metal crack size recognizing used circular patch antenna. In E3S Web of Conferences (Vol. 464, p. 01017). EDP Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202346401017

Now, take a look at the six articles mentioned above and try to list four key contributions from each. Let's give Humanities and Management scholars the benefit of the doubt, as their papers are theoretical in nature. Carefully review the Computer Science papers [1], [2], and [3] listed in the table.

Next, recall the six key questions mentioned earlier in this article. Now, categorize all six articles within the framework of these key questions.

As an Electrical and Electronics Engineer, one can easily analyze articles [5] and [6]. These articles do not present any novel contributions. Simply put, the PIFA antenna is already well understood and extensively researched. Article [5] merely demonstrates a well-known parameter variation technique used by engineers to optimize basic parameters.

Moreover, the authors of [6] fail to explain the rationale behind their study. In fact, the article does not provide the resonance frequency shift results that were mentioned in the abstract. Acoustics have long been effectively used for crack detection in the industry, and previous attempts to use high-frequency electromagnetic waves have failed to match the accuracy and simplicity of acoustic methods for this purpose. Therefore, I did not gain any new insights from article [6].

Similar issues exist in conference articles from IEEE Xplore that are not appearing in the well established or well known conferences.

Some examples of Good Conference Literature that one can consider has been listed below:

[7] Agarwal, M., & Meshram, M. K. (2016, August). Isolation improvement of 5 GHz WLAN antenna array using metamaterial absorber. In 2016 URSI Asia-Pacific Radio Science Conference (URSI AP-RASC) (pp. 1050-1053). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/URSIAP-RASC.2016.7601144

[8] Wong, K. L., Tsai, C. Y., Lu, J. Y., Chian, D. M., & Li, W. Y. (2016, August). Compact eight MIMO antennas for 5G smartphones and their MIMO capacity verification. In 2016 URSI Asia-Pacific Radio Science Conference (URSI AP-RASC) (pp. 1054-1056). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/URSIAP-RASC.2016.7601145

[9] Chopade, P., Khan, S. M., Edwards, D., & von Davier, A. (2018, October). Machine learning for efficient assessment and prediction of human performance in collaborative learning environments. In 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.https://doi.org/10.1109/THS.2018.8574203

[10] Zhang, Y., Zhan, Y., Yang, Y., & Wang, Y. (2020, October). Application research of machine learning in automatic identification of fish parasitic viscera species. In 2020 2nd International Conference on Machine Learning, Big Data and Business Intelligence (MLBDBI) (pp. 163-166). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/MLBDBI51377.2020.00036

[11] Choi, J., Kim, S., Lee, Y., Heo, S., Jung, K. D., Hwang, Y. H., & Park, J. E. (2023, November). A 1.08 ms Ultrafast Scanning Capacitive Touch-Screen Sensor Interface with Charge-Interpolated Common-Mode Compensation and Host-Based Adaptive Median Filtering. In 2023 IEEE Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference (A-SSCC) (pp. 1-3). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/A-SSCC58667.2023.10347943

[12] Lee, C., & Chung, K. S. (2019, December). Gram: Gradient rescaling attention model for data uncertainty estimation in single image super resolution. In 2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Machine Learning And Applications (ICMLA) (pp. 8-13). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMLA.2019.00011

[13] Khattak, G. R., Vallecorsa, S., Carminati, F., & Khan, G. M. (2019, December). Particle detector simulation using generative adversarial networks with domain related constraints. In 2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Machine Learning And Applications (ICMLA) (pp. 28-33). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMLA.2019.00014

[14] Meng, K., & Meng, Y. (2019, December). Through-wall pose imaging in real-time with a many-to-many encoder/decoder paradigm. In 2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Machine Learning And Applications (ICMLA) (pp. 14-21). IEEE.https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMLA.2019.00012

What do you observe in the above listed literature material from [7]-[14]?

We shall discuss the same in the next article.