Importance of Literature Survey in Research

Being engaged in academic research, we spend a lot of time thinking about a novel idea or, so to say, some novel methodology as part of our research journey. We do laborious work, performing experiments, writing code, running simulations day and night, getting suboptimal to optimal results, and then infer it as some novel work to package as a research paper for publication, only to come to know that similar work has already been published just weeks before we planned to send it to the journal.

This can be frustrating for anyone; yes, we gain knowledge, but at what cost?

As we all know, when we propose our research interest or the direction, we want our research to go in, the first thing we have to do is a literature survey. We search keywords, download relevant papers after skimming through the abstracts; sometimes we download just by looking at the title, and sometimes we reject papers just by their titles, basically judging the book by its cover. Eventually, we find some research gap and start our work. That’s the first mistake.

I recently realized from our discussion that literature review is not a step-one process, but a continuous one. It should be done throughout the research journey. We have to dedicate some fixed time daily to follow similar papers in the domain we’re working in. That way, we don’t miss any recently emerged ideas.

The second mistake is not checking citations properly. All the papers we download, especially those forming the base of our research, should be checked for ‘Cited by’ on Google Scholar or Scopus. That way, we can see how others have extended the work and in what directions we can pursue our own research.

The discussion ultimately converged on the conclusion that maintaining a diary for the literature survey is an effective practice. It allows us to track ideas, reassess direction and adapt changes whenever necessary.

- This article emerged from discussions within the research group “Conceptualization and Modelling”, headed by Prof. Basudev Biswal, and is compiled by Amit Kantode.