Department of Chemical & Process Engineering

Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences

ENGM252
M Eng Research Projects
2013 14
Guidelines for the Literature Review

Module Organiser
Prof Norman Kirkby
Version 2.0
Last revision 13/01/14 15:10

2013/14 ENGM252..M Eng Research Project: Literature Review

Introduction
The Literature Review is an important component of the Research Project and in this
document the aims and objectives are explained and some guidance is given as to how to
prepare a good Literature Review.
This year, for the first time, the majority of projects are being conducted in teams of two
students, the Literature Review is a joint activity and you are required to submit just one,
Literature Review report. For students working alone, due allowance will be made in the
assessment and marking of the Literature Review.
As a Department, we are very keen to encourage excellent work from our students and to
provide the widest choice of exciting and challenging projects. For this reason, we are
reluctant to be too mechanically prescriptive about the Literature Review because we do not
want it to control the contents of a project. Some projects will inevitably have much more
literature to go at than others, and supervisors will advise students about the point at which
the Literature Survey should not be taken further, and this discussion should be noted in the
minutes of the meetings between supervisors and students.
In the later stages of the project it may be necessary to consult literature not reviewed for this
survey. This is to be expected but not abused! The draft papers, portfolio and the
presentations are allowed to refer to literature not cited in the original Literature Review but
students should expect that this may be noticed and that questions may be asked about why
this literature was not included in the Literature Review. In a subject with a very big body of
literature it is almost inevitable that extra literature will need to be cited once the results have
been obtained.

Aims & Objectives

The first objective is that every student should improve their skills required to access the
scientific literature in depth using appropriate web and library tools. These skills should
already be well developed from both the Design Project and the MDDP.
It is expected that every student should be able to write a succinct summary of the literature
found, in their own words and citing sources correctly and compiling a list of references
appropriately.
The Literature Review should be a critical survey and students are expected to organise the
presentation so that they can discuss where different papers agree and where they disagree
about theory, experimental methods or experimental results. It is especially important that
students develop a critical mind-set when reading scientific papers so that errors, mistakes
and areas for improvement can be identified.
The aim is that all students should write a Literature Review of publishable quality:
A good Literature Review is much more than a reading diary! A good Literature Review will
contain evidence that the search was significantly more sophisticated than merely typing a
few search terms into a typical web search engine!
In addition to reviewing work that has already been published, a good Literature Review also
identifies the new questions and challenges that a problem, subject or a topic has not already

2013/14 ENGM252..M Eng Research Project: Literature Review

addressed, and states why it is important that these questions be addressed and the evidence
for this importance.

Avoiding Plagarism
It is important in a research project, and especially in the Literature Review, that students
correctly attribute credit to the sources they have used. Sources must be cited using only one
of the two common citation styles:
1) Numerical, e.g. (1), or(1), or
2) Harvard, e.g. authors and year, (Kirkby 2013),
but not both! You may wish to identify the target journal for your scientific paper and follow
the recommendations given in their Notes for the guidance of authors but this is not
essential.
The References List must give appropriate details of each of the papers, conference
proceedings, books and web sites that are cited.
In addition to the References List, it may also be useful to include a Bibliography, in which
are listed useful places for further searches, e.g. names of journals, interest groups on Google
etc.
Use direct quotations very sparingly and make sure that they are in italic font, enclosed in
quotation marks and properly referenced. This is also important for tables of data, charts
graphs and diagrams.
Students should be advised to redraw diagrams, graphs etc, and also, in this way, data from a
variety of sources can be compared readily.
(In the portfolio, students will be expected to include the main search terms and techniques
used to access the literature cited but the mechanics of the search do not have to be reported
in the Literature Review)

Analysis of the Literature

A Literature Review describes the content of relevant literature: e.g. it might say that Ref 1
indicates that hydrodesulphurisation of gas oil is conducted at 340 oC and Ref 2 indicates that
hydrodesulphurisation of gas oil is conducted at 370 oC.
The next level is the comparative Literature Review which would note (state explicitly), in
addition to the above information, that these two references give different values for the same
temperature.
The third level is the critical Literature Review which, in addition to noting the difference in
temperature for the same process, would discuss how and why the temperatures might be
different in the two articles (e.g. one is twenty years out of date and improvements in
catalysts now enable lower temperatures to be used) or pass judgement on the reliability of
one or both of the sources (e.g. one reference is in an article the main focus of which is amine
treatment whereas the other is written by a known industry expert on refinery reactors) or

2013/14 ENGM252..M Eng Research Project: Literature Review

would state that further information supporting one or other of these temperatures must be
sought.

Literature Review Databases

Students are strongly encouraged to use computer programs that allow them to organise the
literature they have found, annotate the literature with their own notes, and which may
provide cite as you write support.
Microsoft Word has some of these facilities.
The University has site licences for Endnote and Reference Manager (but sometimes has
been reluctant to allow undergraduates onto the site licence)
Mendeley is available as a free download

Length of the Literature Review

It is not easy to give explicit advice about the required length of the literature review
because different topics and subjects will have very different amounts of literature available:
a project on distillation cannot possibly review the entire literature, but a new topic may have
almost no direct literature. In both of these cases, students will be guided by their
supervisors, and may even start the execution phase of their project early if necessary.
As a guide, at 10 hours per week for 12 weeks, a student could easily read 60 papers of about
10 pages each. (2 hours per paper?)
A resulting report from a team of two may be about 30 pages in total and cite over 100
papers. However, please note, Literature reviews will be read and not weighed in order to
allocate marks.
Students working alone can scale these numbers appropriately.
Where a supervisor agrees that the most significant papers in the literature have been found,
and declares that no further search is required, it is important that this is recorded in the
meeting minutes.

Contents
A Title Page, authors, authors URNs, Supervisors etc
Contents
Project outline description (not more than 1 page), to provide context for the literature review
Literature Review possibly organised into several subsections.
References List
(Optionally) Bibliography
(Optionally) A declaration that the research phase of the project itself has already started, and
when it started.
Every significant section of your report should be identified as being written by either a
named individual or explicitly by you both (for teams of two or more)

2013/14 ENGM252..M Eng Research Project: Literature Review

Some common errors of English usage

Take care with "its" and "its". Do not use an apostrophe when the meaning is "of it",
as in "Morphine is an opiate. Its main effects are...". "Its" is an abbreviation of "it is" as in
"Its incorrect to use abbreviations in formal text". Avoid the use of "its" altogether and you
will evade censure.

A related error is to introduce an apostrophe into plurals, or "plurals" as some would

say. This really is a low level of literacy.

Chemical names do not begin with a capital letter unless they are trade names.

The word "data" is a plural; hence "data are..." rather than "data is...". Other plural
words are: bacteria, media, criteria, phenomena.

"Dependent" is an adjective, "dependant" is a noun. So responses are "concentrationdependent", not "dependant". A dependant is someone who depends on someone else, as
young children are their parents dependants.

"Lead" as a noun is the element (Pb), or possibly the strip of leather used to stop your
dog escaping. The former is the only use in which this spelling is pronounced so as to rhyme
with "red". Errors are often seen in the use of this word as a verb. "Lead" is the present
tense. The past tense is "led"; i.e. this word does not follow the same rule as "read".

Latin words or phrases such as "in vivo" should be in italics, as in "Experiments

performed in vivo led to different conclusions from those indicated by in vitro experiments".
Note the use of "led"!

Names of species should be in italics. The first word should have a capital letter but
the second should not, and you may abbreviate the first letter after the first inclusion. For
example: Homo sapiens, which can thereafter be written as H. sapiens; Mycobacterium
leprae, later written as M. leprae.

Some words are frequently misspelled: occurred, protein, receive, parallel are
examples.

All sentences must have a verb. If you do not understand what this means, seek help as
soon as possible.
(Thanks to Dr Andrew Macdonald of Leeds University for this section)

Submission
A copy of the literature review must be submitted electronically to the SurreyLearn web site.
Two paper copies of your Literature review should be submitted in the normal way and no
special binding is required.
You are advised to check how Turnitin responds to your efforts, but please note that your
reference list should appear to be completely plagiarised!
For 2013-14 the deadline is Monday 10th February 2014

2013/14 ENGM252..M Eng Research Project: Literature Review

Note For Supervisors

Please let me know if there is further information or advice that you would like to see
included in this document.

Further Information
The library publishes useful guides for student which can be accessed from their home page.
All students are very welcome to consult me, but in the first instance students should consult
their supervisor, and record the advice given in the minutes of the meetings.
Two little books have helped me greatly over the years and I commend them to my colleagues
and students alike:
Martin E A, Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors, OUP, Oxford, 2009
(Adapted from The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, last reprinted in 1988)
New Hart's Rules: The Handbook of Style for Writers and Editors (Reference) by R M Ritter
and Oxford University Press, OUP, Oxford 2005
Both are available on Amazon for under 10 each.

NFK
December 2013