Preparing and writing a

“State of the Art” review

Perfecto Herrera
 Outline
• Purposes of the review
• Getting the information
• Organizing the information
• Writing the document
Rationale of the review

nanos gigantum humeris

insidentes

Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants

 Purposes of the review
• The state of the art is a means to an end
• It is an ongoing/organic document:
– Do not wait until some deadline to start
working on it (work-write-write-work-write)
– Do not consider it is closed once you have
started to write another chapter
– Do not wait until it is finished to start other
activities/chapters
 Purposes of the review
• To convey to the reader what knowledge and
ideas have been established on a topic and what
are the strengths and weaknesses.
• To collect and examine the state of current
knowledge in a field by examining the work of
scholars and researchers whose work has been
recognized as valuable.
• To organize knowledge (for you, and for other
people / from you, and from other people)
• A well researched and written literature review
accomplishes three goals:
1. Establishes context for your work by showing what has
been done in the area
2. Exposes the gap in current knowledge
3. Provides you a map of important, secondary and
unimportant issues
Do the review BEFORE other tasks
• Good reasons for beginning a literature review
before starting a research paper:
– To see what has and has not been investigated.
– To develop general explanation for observed
phenomena.
– To identify potential relationships between concepts and
to identify researchable hypotheses.
– To learn how others have defined and measured key
concepts.
– To identify data sources, algorithms, or methods that
other researches have used.
– To develop alternative research projects.
– To avoid reinventing the wheel
– To avoid working on uninteresting, trivial or too complex,
untractable problems
 The s.o.t.a. and your dissertation
• Take the dissertation as a literary plot
– (“exposition, climax, resolution”)
Case:
Results/Evaluation
Problem Proposal/Solution /Appraisal
Relevance of problem

The state of the art sets

the scenario, rules, The state of the
characters, motivations, art makes
constraints that justify possible the
your work (what and appraisal of your
solution
how)
 The s.o.t.a. and your
dissertation

De Waard, A. “From Proteins to Fairytales: Directions in Semantic Publishing”,

IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 83-88, March/April, 2010.
 The s.o.t.a. and your
dissertation
• In the introduction, the scene is set, “creating a research
space,”.The main research question is introduced, and fulfills
the role of the protagonist in a story.
• In the methods and results, various approaches for pursuing
the answer to this research question are presented, and these
correspond to the episodes of a narrative.
• In the conclusion or discussion, resolution is obtained, the
research question is readdressed in light of the experimental
results, and a core claim (the moral of the story) is given.

• Nice parallel between the number of episodes that a fairytale

generally has and the number of experiments described in the
average paper: three to five (It seems that, for the average
person, two is just too few, and six is simply too much.)
 The s.o.t.a. and your
dissertation
• People write things for a reason. The primary goal of a
scientific paper is to persuade (the thesis committee,
the reviewers of a journal/conference), and a secondary
goal is perhaps to inform and educate.

• The format is therefore honed to please referees, who in

turn have become trained to only accept papers that are
persuasive in a very specific way (provide new
information, based on trustworthy measurements, and so
on). In different scientific fields this has led to different
criteria for success.
 Getting the information:
defining and refining the topic
• Defining the topic
– What is the purpose of your work?
– What do you already know about the topic? What is
the scope and approach?
– Do you need everything ever written in English on this
topic, or just the last ten years?
– Which are the key words?
– Are there other words which could be used, such as
synonyms, variations in spelling?
• Compiling a list of keywords
 Getting the information: Keywords
• To search for additional documents, to find synonyms and
equivalent expressions
• To build a conceptual map and rank the importance of subtopics
• To help your work to be indexed by search engines
• To “conform” to the vocabulary of the target community
• Use a Thesaurus
• IEEE keywords:
http://www.ieee.org/documents/2009Taxo
nomy_v101.pdf
• ACM keywords:
http://www.acm.org/about/class/ccs98.txt
 Getting the information:
Bibliographic databases
Through the UPF library: http://www.upf.edu/bibtic/recursos/bd/

• ACM Digital Library

• Annual Reviews
• IEEE Explore
• JSTOR (social sciences, arts & humanities)
• Science Direct
• Springer Link
• Wiley InterScience
• SCOPUS
• Encyclopedia Britannica (cite this one instead of Wikipedia whenever
possible)
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
• Dissertations Abstracts International (see also
http://www.upf.edu/bibtic/es/guiesiajudes/tesism/dbtesis.html)
 Getting the information:
Journals to be watched
Most of them accessible through the UPF library:
http://www.upf.edu/bibtic/recursos/eserial.html
• Computer Music Journal http://www.mitpressjournals.org/cmj
• Journal of New Music Research
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09298215.asp
• Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
http://asa.aip.org/jasa.html
• Journal of the Audio Engineering Society http://www.aes.org/journal/
• IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications/periodicals/taslp/
• EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech and Music Processing
http://www.hindawi.com/GetJournal.aspx?journal=ASMP
• Organised Sound
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=OSO
 Getting the information:
Journals to be watched
Sometimes you will find interesting papers here too:

• Machine Learning
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0885-6125
• Music Perception
http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/mp/
• Psychology of Music
http://pom.sagepub.com/
• IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine
Intelligence
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber
=34
• IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber
=6046
 Getting the information:
Conferences
• Int. Computer Music Conference (ICMC)
• Int. Conf. On Digital Audio Effects (DaFX)
• Int. Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR)
• IEEE Int. Conf. On Acoustics, Speech and Signal
Processing (ICASSP)
• Computer-Human Interaction (CHI)
• New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference
(NIME)
• ACM-Multimedia
• Sound and Music Computing
Be careful with papers from obscure or
very local conferences:
quality standards can be too low
 Getting the information:
Patent databases
Pablo García will tell you why/what/how soon!

• US Patent Office (granted):

http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html
• US Patent Applications (pre-granted):
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-
bool.html
• European Patent Office Search:
http://ep.espacenet.com/quickSearch?locale=en_ep
• Google's Patent Search:
http://www.google.com/patents
 Getting the information:
Books
• Roads, C. (1996). The Computer Music Tutorial. MIT Press.
• Klapuri,A., Davy,M. (2006). Signal processing methods for music transcription.
Springer.
• Zölzer, U. (2002). DaFX: Digital Audio Effects. John Wiley & Sons.
• Wang, D. & Brown, G. (2006). Computational Auditory Scene Analysis: Principles,
Algorithms and Applications. New York: Wiley.
• Beauchamp, J.W. (2007) Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Musical Sounds:
Sound of Music. Springer, N. Y
• Baeza-Yates,R., Ribeiro-Neto,B. (1999). Modern information retrieval. ACM Press
• Witten, I., Frank, E. (2005). Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and
Techniques (Second Edition). Morgan Kaufmann.
• Ras, Z., Wieczorkowska, A. (2010). Advances in Music Information Retrieval. New
York: Springer
• Müller, M. (2007). Information Retrieval for music and motion. New York: Springer

• Not up-to-date information. Good to start-up and step-by-step learning, and

for side-issues not dealt in more technical and concise sources
 Getting the information:
Centres to be watched
• IRCAM
• Queen Mary University of London
• Tampere Technical University & Helsinki Univ. Of Technology
• Johannes Kepler University
• MIT
• Columbia University (Lab Rosa)
• CCRMA – Stanford University
• CCRMIT - McGill University
• Fraunhofer
• AIST (Japan)
• Companies with strong research teams:
– Microsoft
– Mitshubishi
– Philips
– Sun
– Yahoo
– Sony
– Google
Is there any Thesis
or Review Paper
on the same
or very similar topic?
 YES!
– Did you like it? Why? (Imitate) Why not? (Do it
differently)
– Is it very recent? -> If not, one of your
contributions will be updating it
– Is it clear? -> If not, one of your goals is to make
the topic more clear
– Is it comprehensive? -> If not, you can criticize it
in your own review, and one of your contributions
will be that one
– Is it challenging, amazing, pushing you to follow a
similar path? -> If not, maybe you should rethink
on the chosen topic (maybe it is too difficult, too
easy, too typical, etc)
 YES!
Take the existing review as a map for your work:
– Get the papers
– Read them
– Digest them
– Organize your references library and keep it up-to-date
Is there any Thesis
or Review Paper
on the same
or very similar topic?
 NO!
Then you have to work harder:

Before thinking about how “original” and “innovative” is your proposal

consider:
a) Your topic is not well defined (i.e., it is not a proper research problem)
b) You are not using the proper words, keywords or technical expressions
to define it and to search for that
c) It is an old problem that was abandoned before the digital age –you can
only find printed references but not online references-
d) Searching for equivalent or related topics in other disciplines (e.g., video
processing, text processing, genetics, biomechanics, cognition…)

Otherwise, consider the option of having hit a goldmine (new and original
topic)
– BUT if you perseverate on the topic you will not be given the option of
“walking on the shoulders of giants”
– Ask other senior researchers (your supervisor could have turned crazy)
 Getting the information:
Keeping up-to-date
• [Music-DSP]
http://www.music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp/
• [Auditory]
http://www.auditory.org/
• [Music-IR]
http://www.ismir.net/
• [Weka]
https://list.scms.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wekalist
• [Semantic Web]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/
• [SMC]
http://smcnetwork.org/
 Organizing the information
• By source
– It allows you to develop how one researcher or group
of researchers has contributed to the field (paperwise
structure: Smith (1999), then Smith et al. (2000), then
Smith (2001) –one paragraph per researcher-)
• By topic
– It allows you to cover all of the contributions, by
different researchers to one topic, problem or key
area of knowledge (conceptwise structure: you build a
map of the subtopics included in your topic and flesh
the map mixing dates and authors)
• By method/technique/algorithm/approach
• Chronologically
Organizing: grouping your sources (I)
Organizing: grouping your sources (II)
 Organizing: Summarizing
• Try to determine which variables or
dimensions make papers similar or
different
• Build tables summarizing information
• Draw flowcharts
Organizing: asessing the rigour of
your sources
Organizing: asessing the rigour
of your sources
• Asessing the impact of authors, journals,
articles:
– You can get or track authors’s impact indexes
and more relevant info using
• Publish or perish (http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm)
• Scimago (http://www.scimagojr.com/index.php)
• Arnetminer (http://www.scimagojr.com/index.php)
• Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/)
• Science Citation Index (several entry points –
Library, for example)
Organizing: Evaluating the work done
You need to assess the work done in order to establish:
1. What are the significant points of agreement between
articles?
2. Where the research disagrees, is one researcher more
conclusive than another?
3. How previous work has left a gap, because of either
inadequate assumptions, inconclusive findings, poor
methodology, unclear presentation of results,
unavailability of recent technologies, etc;
4. How previous research will be applied in a new context;
5. How general disagreement or different methods, results
or approaches create a need for a solution.
6. How can you fit the articles together to build a logical
argument that furthers your purpose.
 Organizing the information
• Breadth / Depth tradeoff
• From the review, you should be able to
spot on:
– The “core” papers (to be read and
summarized)
– The “interesting” papers (to be succintly
summarized in one or 2 paragraphs)
– The garbage papers (the do exist!): to be
omitted or, better, criticised
 Writing the document
• http://www.upf.edu/bibtic/recursos/treaca/redacteu.html
• Be aware about formatting requirements (by the UPF, by
the potential publisher)
• Which is the style for your MSc Thesis? (see the section:
template)
– http://www.upf.edu/bibtic/en/guiesiajudes/tesis/dina4.html
• Get familiar with IEEE, ACM, and APA citation styles
• Use a bibliography manager:
– Zotero http://www.zotero.org/
– JabRef http://jabref.sourceforge.net/
– Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/
– See for comparison tables:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_
management_software
 Writing the document
• Start with an outline,
– then flesh it up with a summary for each section
– then start adding the main content to each section
– after some writing your outline should be redone, indeed!
• Write, write, write but write for a reader (not for yourself)
– Don’t waste time looking at an empty page
– Don’t stare at the ceiling
– Don’t wait to feel inspired
– Don’t procrastinate
– Get some help from productivity analysis tools (e.g., RescueTime)
• Don’t be critical with your own writing until a draft is
finished
– Re-read, correct, delete, rephrase (minimum 8000 words should be
used) in order to make it understandable
 Writing the document
• Be sensitive to writing style issues (yes,
engineers are not poets, but have to communicate
ideas in the most efficient way -> Style is for that:
exposing, connecting, convincing)
• Give your first draft to your supervisor or office
mate
– Give it at the proper time, not too early
(ununderstandable, unconnected) but not too late (when
you have committed and fallen in love with your view
and text)
– Do English and proofreading on your own devices
(you don’t want your supervisor waste her precious time
on that! –She neither does!)
 Writing the document
Use evidence
• Your statements have to refer to several sources when
making your point (this gives them credibility, validity).
Select those sources giving you the most credibility (e.g. a
solid author is preferred over Wikipedia entries, a journal
article is preferred over a MSc Thesis).
Be selective
• Select only the most important points in each source to
highlight in the review. Exhaustivity is not needed in a
MSc thesis but it is in a PhD thesis.
Use quotes sparingly
• Some short quotes here and there are okay, though, if you
want to emphasize a point, or if what the author said just
cannot be rewritten in your own words. Keep quotation for
certain terms that were coined by the author, not common
knowledge, or taken directly from the study.
 Writing the document
Summarize and synthesize
• Remember to summarize and synthesize your sources
within each paragraph as well as throughout the review.
Connect the findings to your own goals, use them to
backup your position.
Keep your own voice
• While the literature review presents others' ideas, your
voice (the writer's) should remain front and center. Use
the sources to support what you want to present. If you
fail on that, then you can probably be “building Castles in
Spain”, or selling “vapourware”.
Use caution when paraphrasing
• When paraphrasing a source that is not your own, be
sure to represent the author's information or opinions
accurately and in your own words. Double-check that the
ideas you present as “original” cannot be traced back to
any of your sources.
 A simple example

The last
paragraph is not
typical in a s.o.t.a.
unless you are
ending it and
presenting your
work in summary
 Add value to your state of the art
• It can provide a needed update (if the topic has
not been summarized in the last 3 years)
• It can provide a tutorial or introductory reading to
other students
• It can glue or link different pieces of knowledge,
disciplines, techniques, etc.
• It can be valuable as a “stand-alone” article for a
journal
• Convince a “big name” in your topic area to
participate in the article (it increases the quality
and the chance to get published)
 Some examples
• Journal of New Music Research Volume 32,
Issue 1, 2003 contains several state-of-the-art
reviews (by Emilia, Fabien Gouyon, or Perfe)

• http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~d
b=all~content=g714018053
• Please, send me additional useful
pointers, missing info, suggestions, etc. to
improve the ppt for future editions!!!

• Thanks!!