Literature Review

A literature review is the process of understanding what other people have already done to solve a problem. In the context of a research competition, your goal is to understand the current state of the art, common techniques, and key evaluation metrics for your specific task. This allows you to build upon existing work rather than reinventing it.

The Review Process

The process should begin with the most direct approach: finding previous solutions to the exact competition you have chosen. For a Kaggle competition, this means studying the notebooks of previous winners, while for an academic venue like CLEF, this involves finding the working notes and papers from teams who participated in the same shared task in prior years. After grounding yourself in direct solutions, you should broaden your search to related academic work. It is not practical to read every paper; instead, you should read strategically by skimming many titles and abstracts to identify relevance before committing to reading a select few papers in-depth. Modern AI-powered research tools can significantly accelerate this process by searching for and consolidating information on a given topic into a summary report.

Organization and Synthesis

As you gather resources, it is critical to keep your sources organized. A dedicated citation manager like Zotero is highly recommended, as it allows you to save articles directly from your browser and share libraries with your team. The final and most important step of the review is to synthesize your findings into a coherent narrative. This written summary, in your own words, should explain the state of the art and how your proposed work fits into it. This synthesis is a critical component for both the initial research proposal and the introduction or related work section of your final paper.