Mastodawn

Emma Tosch, Thought Follower Apr 13

This question is for folks who have done some kind of computing research.

Did you ever get formal training in how to do a literature review? What about informal training?

Some options, in case that lowers the barrier to entering the conversation:

Learned in a formal course

7.3%

Learned from peers

27.3%

Learned from advisor

34.5%

Other

30.9%

Poll ended at Apr 20 at 6:01pm.

Emma Tosch, Thought Follower Apr 13

As a follow-up question: what platform do you do use for search?

Google Scholar

76.9%

JSTOR/EBSCOhost/via library

0%

ArXiv

7.7%

Other

15.4%

Poll ended at Apr 20 at 6:16pm.

@etosch
for computers: acm
for everything else: library search
in general: following citation chains from any work that i'm starting from

Emma Tosch, Thought Follower Apr 14

@cxli I originally had ACM in here but could only have four options, so I replaced it with other!

Emma Tosch, Thought Follower Apr 14

@cxli For context: the #acmdl frictions make systematic reviews painful. It feels borderline unusable as a research tool and is incomplete.

#googlescholar is more complete, but the accuracy of the metadata drops off. I've found that historic searches (e.g., <1950) are mostly incorrectly dated.

I was curious whether this is corroborated by research and came across: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7079055/
...

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Emma Tosch, Thought Follower

@cxli FWIW the tl;dr version of this article is in the Discussion section:

> Overall, we found that only 14 of the 28 academic search systems examined are well‐suited to evidence synthesis in the form of systematic reviews...[and...can be used as principal search systems: ACM Digital Library, BASE, ClinicalTrials.gov, Cochrane Library, EbscoHost ..., OVID ..., ProQuest ..., PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, TRID, Virtual Health Library, Web of Science ..., and Wiley Online Library.