Your literature review should be around 4-6 pages including references, as a pdf file in your repository or as a wiki page. It should have a title, author's details, an abstract, an introduction followed by sections as appropriate and references should be all grouped at the end in a References section. Citations and references must be made in a consistent format (see below the reference section for examples).

Key elements assessed will be:

• good choice of work described in terms of relevance and importance
• clear description of the most relevant related work
• clear statement of the reasons why you consider the work to be important
• clear linkage of literature to your part of your project
• clarity of writing, in terms of high level structure and English surface writing

What is a citation?

• Key pieces of information that should uniquely identify the work and make access possible
• Authors (order matters!)
• Title
• Journal title (with volume and number), conference proceedings (with name of the conference, location, year), edited book
• Date (Year, maybe also month)
• Page numbers
• If web source only, include URL and date accessed

• Search digital library databases: IEEE, ACM, School of IT, USYD library
• Search the web: Google, citeseer (but make sure the source is academically valid)
• Follow up reference links from other papers on same topic, or from community links (look at authors' web sites, conference proceedings, journals covering your topic)
• Use only articles that are published in recognised academic sources (refereed journals, conferences). You may also refer to material from companies' web site (such as SUN Microsystems, etc..) if your topic needs to refer to commercialised tools, but that should not form the core part of your review

• Keep completed bibliography references (including pages, dates)
• Extract the essence of each paper: what is claimed, what evidence, what argument, what methodology, what results
• Keep a critical eye: are there any gap, any doubt, any unsubstantiated claim?

• Isolate issues and highlight findings and contributions that are central to your topic
• Group together papers that deal with a related theme/issue
• Use diagrams, tables, concept maps to organise materials
• Chronological order not particularly useful, but citation chains are
• Note: papers often don't use common terminology or focus on common issues, or explain relationships fairly. Clarifying these aspects is a key contribution you can make