Finding Related Work

You often need to read up on new topics, which may feel challenging. However, there is a generic recipe that may simplify this process a lot. 

Intended for: MSc, PhD

1. Identify relevant keywords for your topic.   

• Go to Scholar: Head to Google Scholar, and type in some keywords of the topic you are looking for. 

• Explore keywords: This sounds trivial, but discovering the correct scientific term for a topic can actually be surprisingly hard, especially in the beginning of a master's/PhD thesis. You may also ask supervisors or colleagues. (Still, it happens to everyone that you suddenly discover a new 'bubble' of work under a new keyword in which they study similar problems as you work on.)

2. Identify & read relevant surveys. 

Survey/review articles provide a structured overview of all work done on a certain topic. You can see them as papers with exclusive (but very extensive) related work and future work sections, which may save you a lot of time (directly providing the overview you seek).  

• Combine your keywords with the term 'survey' or 'review', and see whether one pops up. 

• High quality surveys are not always available: there may be no survey on your topic, the available surveys may be outdated, or the quality may be low.  Scan for these issues. Otherwise, read the survey to get a better grasp of the research field.
  
  
  

3. Identify relevant research papers ('hooks') & read Related Work sections. 

• Read abstracts: Scan the research papers in your Scholar search with a relevant title, open them, and read their abstract.  Identify papers that seem relevant, which may serve as 'hooks' (anchors) into the literature. Citation scores can be an indicator that a paper is used a lot, but it is obviously not the only metric.

• Read related work sections:  The authors of your 'hook' paper probably already did a lot of work for you! They wrote their own Related Work section, in which they ideally categorize approaches in the field, providing you with a quick overview (the are 'mini surveys'). Therefore, read the Related Work section of these papers. 

• (Important: do not read full papers yet. This takes much time, while you first want to get a general overview before you decide which papers to read in detail). 

4. Perform a forward and/or backward search from a relevant paper. 

• Backward search: The Related Work section of your 'hook' paper not only provides you with an overview, it also points you to relevant other papers. Identify interesting papers from the Related work sections of your 'hook' paper, open them, and go back to step 3. Repeating this process allows you to search 'backward in time' (moving from Related Work to Related Work section). 

• Forward search: There have probably been more recent publications on your topic, which appeared after your 'hook' article was published. However, these papers probably cite your hook paper in their Related Work section! Therefore, click on the "Cited by" item below your hook article in Google Scholar (See Figure), to get a list of papers that appeared after your hook article and are apparently related. Open interesting papers and go back to step 3. Repeating this process allows you search 'forward in time' (moving from 'Cited by' to 'Cited by' section). 
  
  

Note: You can of course use blog posts to read up on a topic, but try to check their quality (which is of course hard to assess if you are still reading up on a topic). Their quality varies a lot. Eventually, text books, research papers and blog posts from known researchers are the safest bet when it comes to new information.