Literature Review
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and flattery will get you everywhere…
For a laugh, check the full quote of the first clause above.Academic Citations
Modern academia is built upon sharing: generations toil intellectually so that future generations can toil on harder, farther, deeper (pick your preferred comparative adjective) tasks by building upon previously established knowledge.
Proper citation serves two purposes:
- It acknowledges the work of others, which is nice but more importantly adds credence to your claims and work;
- It allows readers to easily confirm your claims and learn more about the topics you cite.
The Process
Start by finding proper academic databases by visiting
Georgia Tech's online list of databases.
There, pick some databases that seem appropriate for your topic of interest and search for papers.
Different journals demand different levels of respect, but you don't need to worry about that for this literature review. Just focus on getting a few relevant, seemingly well-written peer-reviewed research papers.
Read the papers and read the citations. Some of those citations will become the next papers you read.
We will spot check your citations, and what we'll expect is this: when you cite a paper to buttress a claim, the paper you cite ought to establish the claim through argument or experiment. If your cited paper simply cites another paper to make your claim, then your group is liable to receive a grade deduction for an improper citation.
It would be inappropriate to simply cherry pick claims and citations from Paper A (essentially using Paper A as a proxy literature review); it is fine to use Paper A as a nexus for research that you then cite independently (after reading it!) to build up your own history of a topic and make your own arguments in it. And it is perfectly appropriate to cite a paper you used as background but did not rely upon for in-text citations.
The Citation Process
Use
APA Style Citations to reference your sources and databases. The full bibliographic citations should appear as an appendix in a 'References' section. You will use in-text citations throughout.
There are a plethora of online resources re: proper use of APA citations.
Purdue University's Online Writing Lab has historically been a nice site for those new to APA citations. These days, however, I would expect any quality LLM to be useful in providing dynamic guidance (that you should still verify for correctness) re: generally proper in-text and full bibliographic citations.
Using Third-Party Citation Tools
You are free to use any 3rd-party tools or software you like for the purposes of <span class='underline font-semibold'>citing sources you find through your own research</span>. In other words, using something like Mendeley or EndNote is fine; using an LLM product to perform research for you and assemble the citations is not (and frankly it wouldn't be very good).