Literature Review

Cooper (1988) defines Literature Review as below:

“..a literature review uses as its database reports of primary or original scholarship, and does not report new primary scholarship itself. The primary reports used in the literature may be verbal, but in the vast majority of cases reports are written documents. The types of scholarship may be empirical, theoretical, critical/analytic, or methodological in nature. Second a literature review seeks to describe, summarize, evaluate, clarify and/or integrate the content of primary reports.”

Literature review captures the information which is already published in a given subject area within certain time period (UNC, 2017). Review of literature can be just a summary based or summary as well as synthesis. Summary captures the gist of information while synthesis reorganize the information. Literature review captures the intellectual progression of the field in the given area of research subject.

Literature reviews are generally found in two forms:

1. Journal Article category

2. Dissertation

CTU (2016) laid down the description of above two types of literature review as:

1. Literature Review – Journal article category

Main purpose of literature review in articles is to review and analyze the literature in a given subject area by providing a selective review of different knowledge sources or a detailed information of main contributions to the field

2. Literature Review – Dissertation

Objective of literature review in dissertation is to provide useful background of research, laying out a hypothesis and finding gaps in the body of knowledge for one’s own dissertation of research.

Literature review of an article -

Majmudar, Kumar and Desai (2016) presents the literature review on the subject area of opinion mining and sentiment analysis on online customer reviews. Tools and techniques are presented to perform opinion mining and sentiment analysis by breaking down the process into retrieval, classification and summarization. Example of Amazon is provided which rates the product on a scale of 1 through 5. SentiWordNet based algorithm is highlighted which helps in finding opinion of the sentence. Polarity of opinion is than mentioned using multiple approaches. Finally review conclude with the holistic overview of classification techniques, clustering algorithms and challenges in sentiment analysis and opinion mining.

Overall review is very well written and outlines the current status of research in the area of opinion mining and sentiment analysis in the light of techniques, tools and algorithms.

The intent of the article is to present the comparative performance of multiple opinion classification methodologies. However the literature review did not mention the theoretical and methodological differences across different classification methods which are later compared against each other. Some background information of different classification algorithm would have helped in laying the foundation to understand the final results of comparative analysis.

Reference:

CTU (2016) Doctoral Sudies - Literature Review Retrieved from http://careered.libguides.com/ctu/LR

Cooper, H. (1988) The structure of knowledge synthesis, Knowledge in Society, Vol 1, 104-126

UNC (2017) The Writing Center – Literature Reviews Retrieved from http://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/literature-reviews/

Majmudar, J., Kumar, S., & Desai, J. (2016). Opinion mining and sentiment analysis on online customer review. 2016 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research.

Royal (2017) defines action research as a participative research with people rather than research on people. Action research helps in creating solutions and interventions which results in organizations success. Davies (2017) further differentiate action research from basic research as below:

1. Action research improve practice while basic research produce knowledge

2. Action research solves localized issues of stakeholders whereas basic research service generalizations with broad applicability

3. Sample size of action research is limited to case study while basic research has large and randomized samples

4. Action research involves continuous cyclic process of act and review whereas basic research is a complex linear process involving limited variables and strict control to limit bias and error

5. Action researcher facilitates the research with client by collaboration while basic researcher remains an outsider

One of the work related action research involve the issue of ‘no audio’ calls by mobile customers which are considered as failed calls by network. Task team analyzed the problem and realized that customers hangs up after experiencing ‘no audio’ calls thus showing up as normal call clearing instead of failed calls in network records. Upon further investigation, customer’s behavior was identified that after every ‘no audio call’ usually customer clears the call in 5 to 10 seconds and then attempt another call to the same called party within 5 to 10 seconds. After the customer’s signature is identified in a typical ‘no audio’ call experience, an algorithm was developed to isolate such calls using call detail records thus locating the transport circuits causing failed calls lead to rectification of issue. However process is a continuous cyclic process because transport circuits can degrade anytime anywhere due to varying reasons thus continuous monitoring of customer behavior is needed to identify ‘no audio’ signature in a timely fashion and adjust algorithm if needed.

Few topics of research that can employ the method of action research are below:

1. Analysis of social media feeds to identify spread of seasonal infections in a given locality for early medical intervention to reduce impact. It will be an iterative process varying with season and continuous adjustment needed to tweak analytic engine capturing words matching specific symptom correctly.

2. Related to educational institutions, frequent complaints are observed where students lack interest in academic activities. An iterative process can be setup by teacher to modify the home assignments and class works to monitor student engagement and overall improvement. Actions will continue to modify slightly based on the review of outcome thus achieving overall success.

Reference:

Royal, C. (2017) Action Research Assessment and Analysis Retrieved from http://careered.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=31226720

Davies, K. (2017) Action Research: Flipping the consulting process Retrieved from http://careered.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=28392595