How to write a literature review? (Take the document management software using Zotero as an example)

Article content summary

This article mainly uses Zotero's literature management software as an example to explain in detail the writing of a literature review from beginning to end. From establishing a literature library, searching files, exporting classification reports, recording keywords during reading, to referencing the article outline, writing the main body of the article, and finally generating references, it is described in detail. I believe you will gain something after reading it.

Preface

I believe that many people will encounter some problems when writing a literature review. They may not know where to start, or they may be very confused about how to find the part they want from hundreds or even hundreds of articles.

First of all, we need to make it clear that writing a literature review does not require reading every article in detail or even understanding it. Because firstly, it takes a lot of time to read hundreds of articles, and you may forget the contents of the previous articles after reading this one. Secondly, some articles may be half-understood or even incomprehensible based on my level (representing only the author). Then it will be very painful for you to study such articles with an understanding mentality, and thus you will not understand the purpose of this literature review. The task is very resistant.

Therefore, I summarized a process-based method for writing a literature review, thereby turning writing a review into a procedural matter, which can quickly establish the framework and details of the entire review.

1. Use literature management software to establish a literature library

1. Create document classification

There are many popular document management software on the market, mainly endnote, NoteExpress, etc. I mainly use Zotero. The main reason why I choose this software is that I feel that it has a low entry barrier and can be used quickly (this only represents my personal opinion). In short, you must first download a document management software. Below I use the use of Zotero as an example to build a literature library.

I won’t introduce Zotero in detail here.

Create a new document category, and there will be a new folder to store the documents imported next.

After creating the category, open the browser, install the Zotero web plug-in in Google or edge browser, and enable it.

Note: This plug-in can only import documents normally when the Zotero software is running.

2. Search for keywords in the paper database and import them into the literature management software

Use web of science, IEEE Xplore, CNKI, Google Scholar, etc. to search for literature on the topics you want.

Search principles:

1.  确定自己要搜索的主题，可以在高级搜索中设定文章或题目中必须有的关键词；
2.  确定年限，如近五年，如果文献过多有几千篇，考虑缩小年份至近三年或者细化关键词；
3.  排除不相关领域（有的论文库可以）。

Next, I used the first priority development area of ​​the Department of Informatics as an example in the "Priority Development Areas and Themes" announced by the eight university departments of the National Foundation for Literature Collection.

Take web of science as an example

First, take the web of science as an example. Using only "Marine Target detection" as the search target, the following results were obtained:

Originally there were more than 40,000 documents in total, but after the article type was constrained to "conference or article", the time constraint was "2020-2024", and the research field was constrained to "automatic control field", it became 382 articles, which we can finish reading. of magnitude. At the same time, we can see the Zotero folder logo in the upper right corner.

Before clicking on the folder logo, slide to the bottom of the page so that the plug-in can identify all the documents on this page. Clicking on the folder logo will allow you to select the corresponding documents you want to save. I will select all directly here.

Save and the plug-in will be automatically imported into Zotero.

Take IEEE Xplore as an example

It can be seen that there are more than 4,400 conferences and more than 1,000 journals, which is still too much for us to read. Therefore, the scope of documents can be further narrowed down under IEEE. When we determined further topics and years, the number of journals was only over 300 (mainly looking at journals, followed by conferences). If there are still many, you can further determine the source, type, etc. of the literature. There are many such tutorials on the Internet, which are very professional and you can refer to other people's search process.

At this point, we select the corresponding documents and save them in Zotero. There is a folder style above the corresponding browser (sometimes the folder does not appear, but an icon similar to a piece of paper, indicating that batch saving is not possible. Sometimes In this way, you can only save one by one. It is a bug. You must be patient. You can try again another day. Your mood is the most important. )

After the above operation, we can get relevant papers on "marine target detection", preferably 100-200 papers, and sufficient sources of subsequent literature.

At this point we have prepared the required documents for the literature review.

Note: When saving documents, try to save documents from high-quality journals. Otherwise, your final references will be a bunch of documents and journals that are not recognized by everyone, and the quality of the article will be greatly reduced.

2. Export literature, read abstracts and record keywords

Click on the date to sort the documents in reverse chronological order, so that we can read the latest documents first

Click to generate a classification report to get a classification report for this document classification. The classification report includes the document name, author, journal, abstract and some other information.

We can save the generated classification report as pdf or web page. I save it as pdf here.

The next step is to read the title, abstract and record the keywords quickly and continuously . If you don’t understand, you can skip it selectively because there are many documents. But it must be done in quick succession. Otherwise, if you read it in a week, you will have already forgotten the key content. It will probably take you two or three days at most to finish reading it.

For example, I used "YOLO" in the first article, and then recorded it in Word or other casual text-taking software.

“YOLO 1”

This means that "YOLO" is used in the article on the first page. The advantage of this record is that after you read all the documents, you will get the keywords of each article and which page the corresponding article is on.

Paste here one I made before

3. Find one or two literature reviews in this direction and analyze and learn from their article structure.

After reading the previous literature abstracts, our brains already have the corresponding content, but there is no very clear logical structure. We need to read the literature review in this direction to clarify our thinking, and record the subtitles to form a mind map.

Referring to the example of the literature review, we summarize the outline of the literature review based on the many articles and keywords we have seen before, and form an outline of our own. Then we can start writing the literature review.

4. Write a literature review and use literature management software for literature management

According to the outline we have drawn up, we can create a literature review. The main references are the articles we have read before.

How to use these documents? When you are writing the content of a certain subtitle of the literature review, you should look at the content recorded by your keywords. For example, the model used when you wrote "Ocean Target Detection" (just an example, I am a layman), used " YOLO", then you can see that the keyword record contains the first page, page X, and page Y that use YOLO. The articles corresponding to these page numbers are the reference documents. You can go to this page to read the title and abstract of the article and summarize it. You can also use literature management software when referencing it in the article. Zotero used here, how to use Zotero in word can be found on Baidu, I won’t go into details here.

Just write it like this

In this way, I write it down step by step according to the outline. It has references (collected and read earlier), the content is very detailed (you have read the abstract of each article), and the logic is very clear (referring to other literature review outlines) . After writing, just conduct a targeted literature search on the weak parts and supplement them in the word article.

5. Summary

This article mainly describes in detail all aspects of writing a literature review, but some parts may not be fully stated. If you have any questions, please leave a message and I will provide detailed explanations and supplements.

If you think my writing is good, please give me a free like! If there are errors in the content, you are welcome to give me feedback.