Writing in the front

All of you who have participated in scientific research or competitions have deeply understood the importance of literature retrieval and literature reading. Today we will focus on this part of the content.

Blogger planted in zhejiang province is responsible for the scientific research project declaration, “Internet +” innovation entrepreneurship competition technology part of the business plan, the national college students’ mathematical modeling contest paper retrieval and writing and have submitted two English papers and the high level academic journals (although it is not clear is employed or refuse to draft, but I have confidence in their own level of 2333, inflation for a while). In the process of participating in the above competitions and scientific research, I have accumulated a lot of experience in writing and retrieval. Therefore, FOR this topic, I can talk about retrieval, reading and writing among students as a “expert”, of course, I am self-appointed.

Without further ado, let’s get to the point.

Literature retrieval

The situation of being exposed to completely unfamiliar territory

If you receive an unfamiliar topic, you pat your head and try to do it by yourself, instead of looking for relevant literature to learn about previous research results and cutting-edge research status, it is bound to take many detours. Regardless of whether the proposed method can be better than the state-of-the art method, let’s take a step back and say that people in front have thought about everything you can think of. Without sufficient literature search and research, it is difficult to ensure that your work is novel, which is very important. Once you are suspected of academic plagiarism, academic fraud, the label is taken off, basically it is difficult to do academic work.

Everyone has his own literature retrieval method, an effective and recognized efficient “routine” is as follows:

  • The first step is to find the literature review in this field on CNKI. If it can be found, the research status and drawbacks of existing research should be understood from literature review. If not, go to step 2.
  • The second step is to find the most cutting-edge literatures in this field (that is, literatures with relatively new publication dates and authoritative journals) on CNKI, in which the deficiencies in current research and limitations of the proposed methods will be pointed out. (here the journal is more authoritative how to define, first of all, you can see whether it is the core of Peking University, and then check the domestic journal ranking in this field or compare the impact factor of similar journals, you can probably know it is in the upstream and downstream which level)
  • If the first and second steps are not smooth, then congratulations to you, either the keyword refining is not in place to lead to clearly there are domestic related studies have not been found, or the domestic research in this field is really blank. In view of the problem of inappropriate keywords, GENERALLY speaking, I will use synonyms and synonyms to search repeatedly for a topic, to ensure that the omission of literature retrieval is not caused by improper keywords. There is no way to solve the problem of lack of domestic research in a certain field. Google Academic searches in English with the same priority as above, finding reviews first and selecting frontier literature second.

Needs to be pointed out that the set of methods suitable for their own English level is not enough self-confidence, if you are confident of their English is enough, you can skip step 1 step 2, direct use of English literature, not to belittle the domestic academic research level, but Google is the world’s top scholars academic research achievements, However, the domestic literature database only retrieves the research results of domestic scholars, let alone our country’s academic start is later than others, so it is not surprising that people prefer to read English literature and vote in English journals.

First contact with a topic, of course, usually for the terms used in the field of some strange, in the face of see your scalp professional vocabulary is a very painful thing, so it is better to have some “base”, also is to see some domestic papers, know about what a situation, what are the proper nouns, consider to English literature, Will be more gradual.

Ok, so that’s what it’s like to go into completely unfamiliar territory.

Need for intensive reading of the literature in the field

In fact, there are only two situations in which I need to find literature. The first is that I am completely unfamiliar with this field and need to find some literature to learn about it. In this process, I find the deficiencies of existing research and make improvements. In the second case, when the improvement method in mind is very complete and it is necessary to start writing a paper, in this case, it is necessary to read the paper in this field intensively and write a relatively complete and good literature review.

My tutor has a very incisive point of view that writing literature review is like telling stories. You need to straighten out the logic of literature review and tell a good story to serve the content of the following text. To be more specific, in the literature review, you should focus on the shortcomings of the existing methods and the advantages of the methods you are going to propose. In the Introduction part, you should explain where the existing methods are not good enough, which is mainly reflected in XXXX. This study will focus on this point to overcome the shortcomings of XXXX in this field.

So back to the topic, in the case of intensive reading of literature in this field, extensive search is required and all relevant literature should be found as much as possible. On this basis, the most relevant research can be screened out for your paper, and better literature review and post-experiment discussion can be written. In addition, if you omit some important literature in the field, and the peer reviewer knows the field well, he or she will think that you know little about the field, and will question the science and rigor of your paper, which is a very fatal problem.

Next, I’ll introduce two of the most practical retrieval methods for broad searches with minimal omissions.

Multi-keyword retrieval and conditional constraints

Ahead when it comes to how to understand a completely unfamiliar territory, we actually have involved keywords retrieval, is certainly cannot leave the method of literature retrieval, multiple cores in the field of refining the key words are used to retrieve, this is the most practical method, it is best to put all related documents down to as little as possible to reduce certainly missing, but also need to pay attention to here, Some papers have similar key words, but the research content is very different, so a quick scan of titles and abstracts can eliminate most of the “useless” irrelevant papers. This is the practical means of multi-keyword retrieval and literature screening.

And conditional restrictions on a better understanding, add some restrictions to the retrieval of literature, in order to filter part of the paper, such as sorting according to the publication time of the paper, sorting according to the amount of paper cited. In general, the more relevant, the newer, and the higher the journal rank, the more worthy we are to read and cite in the paper. In addition, some old papers with very high citations also need to be cited, because they are likely to be ground-breaking research in the field. Therefore, the limitation of conditions generally includes the inherent screening of academic literature data: publication time and cited amount. There is also a part of subjective limitation: journal grade. The grade of foreign literature journal can refer to the division of Chinese Academy of Sciences or JCR, while the grade of Chinese literature can look at the ranking of domestic journals, which is very easy to find. One index that both can refer to is the impact factor.

Go back to find

Backtracking, as the name suggests, is the process of finding papers by “backtracking”, looking for references in other people’s papers. Often cited by more than one related literature, a large probability will also be the literature you need to cite, so you might as well pay more attention to what has been multiple times cited by different authors of the literature, and back to find it!

Document retrieval tool

For the retrieval of Chinese literature, CNKI and Wanfang can basically meet most of the needs. If one more needs to be added, Baidu Academic is also a good choice. For English literature, Google Scholar does not boast much.

However, there are some exceptions, such as paying to download papers, schools do not subscribe to the journal and so on. At this time there is a method worth trying, sci-hub, Baidu search sci-hub, find the latest available SCI-hub website, I can recite sci-hub.tw and sci-Hub.shop…. That’s impressive, because it works. The usage method is as follows. Sci-hub is very useful in combination with Baidu Academic: First, I found a paper in Google Academic, but it is not OA(Open Access), and the school happened not to subscribe, what should I do? Open Baidu Academic and search for the paper to obtain the doi number of the document.

Here, take He Kaiming’s dark channel prior single image defogging as an example, find the paper and click it

Then we can see the following interface, doi marked in a prominent location.

Then open the SCI-hub url and enter the doi number

Click Open and wait for the end of loading to download. The button marked is download.

OK, done, let’s summarize the key points of literature retrieval methods:

  • Can read English preferred English
  • Can see review first selected review
  • Read high-level journal literature whenever you can
  • Read new literature when you can
  • Pay attention to the cited literatures with high frequency in relevant literatures and conduct backtracking search
  • If you can use Google Scholar in foreign languages, use Google Scholar, and if you can use CnKI and Wanfang in Chinese
  • Search not on Baidu academic search doi combined with SCI-hub
  • If all else fails, there’s nothing the blogger can do

Next comes literature reading.

Literature reading

Literature reading is easy to talk about. When screening whether an article needs to be relevant, whether it needs to be intensive reading, first look at the title, it looks relevant, then look at the abstract, or relevant, look at the conclusion, it is all relevant, then you have to look at this literature carefully. Otherwise, irrelevant literature was deleted directly.

For the article that needs intensive reading, the experiment that can repeat the literature repeats the experiment of the literature, or in terms of image processing class, it is called the method of reproducing the paper. Only when you actually reproduce the method of others, can you better understand a train of thought of the author of the literature, and also quickly discover some things that he did not tell you in the literature, for example, this method is extremely slow, or this method may have big problems for certain test images. Only by discovering the problems of others can there be room and possibility for further improvement.

OK, to summarize the main points of literature reading:

  • First title, after summary, and then conclusion, related to intensive reading, not related to delete.
  • For the literature with high correlation, if it can be reproduced, it can better understand and find the limitations and defects of the method that the author did not point out.

That’s all for this blog! Although there are not many, they are very practical, very insightful, which is my way of groping all the way through these times, and also provides a shortcut for readers. Of course, this shortcut is suitable for you to take, whether it is good, you have to try to know.

The work of conscience, please like, coin (crossed out), comment, forward, let more partners to lay a good foundation of scientific research ~

Thank you, thank you!