Writing a literature review is an essential yet challenging part of academic research, particularly when

it comes to the complex and rapidly evolving field of recommender systems. This process involves
meticulously sifting through a vast array of scholarly articles, books, and other resources to identify
relevant studies, analyze their findings, and synthesize them into a coherent narrative. The goal is to
provide a comprehensive overview of the existing research, highlighting key developments,
methodologies, and gaps in the literature.

The task is daunting for several reasons. First, the sheer volume of literature on recommender
systems can be overwhelming, with thousands of papers published across various disciplines
including computer science, information technology, marketing, and psychology. Keeping abreast of
the latest research is a time-consuming endeavor that requires a systematic approach to searching and
reviewing literature.

Second, the classification of recommender systems research involves understanding and navigating
through multiple dimensions, such as algorithms (collaborative filtering, content-based filtering,
hybrid approaches), domains of application (e-commerce, entertainment, education), and evaluation
metrics (accuracy, diversity, novelty). This complexity necessitates a deep understanding of the field,
as well as an ability to critically evaluate and compare different studies.

Moreover, synthesizing the findings from disparate studies to identify trends, patterns, and research
gaps requires not only a comprehensive knowledge base but also strong analytical skills. It involves
discerning the quality of research, understanding the context in which studies were conducted, and
drawing connections between them to build a narrative that advances the understanding of
recommender systems.

Given these challenges, it is not surprising that many researchers and students find the process of
writing a literature review in the field of recommender systems to be a formidable task. It requires a
significant investment of time and effort, as well as expertise in information retrieval, critical
analysis, and academic writing.

For those who find themselves struggling with this complex and time-consuming process, seeking
professional assistance can be a practical solution. Services like ⇒ StudyHub.vip ⇔ offer expert
support for literature reviews and other academic writing tasks. With a team of experienced writers
and researchers who specialize in a wide range of disciplines, ⇒ StudyHub.vip ⇔ can provide high-
quality, customized assistance that meets the specific needs of your project. Whether you are just
starting your literature review or need help refining and organizing your findings, turning to
professionals can save you time and ensure that your review is comprehensive, well-structured, and
effectively communicates the state of research in the field of recommender systems.
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Literature Review Basics Literature review basics A literature review synthesizes and analyzes
previous research in a field to inform an audience and establish background knowledge.
Persuasiveness -- which of the author's theses are most convincing or least convincing. Many of
these academic proposals are quite complex and may easily cognitively overload average end users.
You don’t want to substitute a thorough review of core research literature in your discipline for
studies conducted in other fields of study. Make a list of keywords Start by creating a list of
keywords related to your research topic. Preliminary suppositions and implications The purpose of
this section is to argue how and in what ways you anticipate that your research will refine, revise, or
extend existing knowledge in the area of your study. Tips for writing the research design and
methods section: Specify the methodological approaches you intend to employ to obtain information
and the techniques you will use to analyze the data. In other words, sources cited in your
bibliography may not necessarily appear in the body of your research proposal. Similar considerations
apply for approaches that implement mechanisms for user control in recommender systems (
Ekstrand et al., 2015; Jannach et al., 2016 ). We will follow these thoughts and steps to try to obtain
the optimal treatment policy which aims to maximize the reward coming from each user with respect
to the control recommendation policy. Should I evaluate the sources in any way beyond evaluating
how they relate to understanding the research problem? 5. A more formal characterization of the
calibration was introduced by Steck in Steck (2018) who proposed an approach for reranking the
recommendations such that the final list is both relevant and also matched the genre preference of
the users. Many errors are made in referencing, even by top researchers, and so it is important not to
perpetuate an error made by someone else. It is our hope that our descriptive account will serve as a
valuable source for those conducting, evaluating or using reviews in this important and growing
domain. An attempt to investigate the relationship between perceived diversity and the widely used
intra-list similarity measure can be found in Jesse et al. (2022). Sheppard is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where
otherwise noted. I am looking for a conversational AI engagement solution for my business I am
looking to partner with Engati to build conversational AI solutions for other businesses continue
Finish You're a step away from building your Al chatbot How many customers do you expect to
engage in a month. Remember that the main purpose of a literature review is to demonstrate what
existing knowledge is out there on your topic, and to evaluate it. Systematic reviews that involve the
rigorous application of scientific strategies aimed at limiting subjectivity and bias (i.e., systematic
and random errors) can respond to this challenge. There are a few guidelines you should follow
during the writing stage as well. In such approaches ( Adomavicius and Kwon, 2015 ), users are not
expected to specify their preferences for different item features in general but are assumed to rate
features of specific items. For example, in the tourism recommendation domain, they might assess a
given hotel in dimensions such as value for money, cleanliness, or friendliness of the staff. What is
the significance of your proposed research. In other words, your theoretical framework should reveal
some insights about what answers you might expect to find to your research questions. This will give
you a better understanding of the author’s argument and what to focus on in your own review. 2. Not
critically evaluating the sources. If you are in doubt about how to approach a literature review,
always follow up with your rubric, syllabus, professor or teaching assistant. Galvan, J. L. (2009).
Writing Literature Reviews: A Guide for Students of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. This means
that you should focus on critical writing, rather than simply providing a summary of what others
have written. Victoria (BC): University of Victoria; 2017 Feb 27. Darlow and Wen (2015) provide a
good example of a highly structured narrative review in the eHealth field. Consequently, the
previously mentioned approach is biased by the exposure data.
It is the first quantitative review work completely focused in hybrid recommenders. Take notes and
cite your sources As you read, you should also begin the writing process. If you choose this strategy,
be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. If you are in doubt about how to
approach a literature review, always follow up with your rubric, syllabus, professor or teaching
assistant. Galvan, J. L. (2009). Writing Literature Reviews: A Guide for Students of the Social and
Behavioral Sciences. We address the most relevant problems considered and present the associated
data mining and recommendation techniques used to overcome them. It created a need to implement
Recommendation Systems (RS), that would leverage customers’ data to create personalized
suggestions for products and identify relevant information for them. Often, the literature review is
where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way.
One of the most important benefits of writing a literature review is that it can help you to identify
gaps in the existing research. Findings revealed that there were over 77,000 medical informatics
articles published during the covered period in numerous journals and that the average annual growth
rate was 12%. The Empirical Research Onto the second essential ingredient, which is empirical
research. Like any other academic text, your literature review should have an introduction, a main
body, and a conclusion. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take
up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions
separately from where you discuss the literature itself. History: The chronological progression of the
field, the research literature, or an idea that is necessary to understand the literature review, if the
body of the literature review is not already a chronology. This exercise requires a significant
investment on the part of researchers, who must ensure enhanced objectivity and avoid biases or
mistakes. In other words, sources cited in your bibliography may not necessarily appear in the body
of your research proposal. This is because literature reviews provide an overview of the latest
thinking in a particular subject area. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC
Libraries citation tutorial. The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the
literature review. Create a matrix of the studies for easy analysis, and synthesis, across all of the
studies. A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area. Purpose: It
serves to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge within a particular
field. For example, is it possible that your research may lead to a new policy, new theoretical
understanding, or a new method for analyzing data. Assume that the person or people who will read
your research proposal know nothing or very little about the research problem. A literature review
can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and
combines both summary and synthesis. The authors here recapitulate important features of
Hamilton’s study, but then synthesize it by rephrasing the study’s significance and relating it to their
own work. There are many resources that offer step-by-step guidance for writing a literature review,
and you can find some of them under Other Resources in the menu to the left. We look for the books
on computer science from top Indian Institutions, and scores these recommended books using above
method. The goal is to deliberately document, critically evaluate, and summarize scientifically all of
the research about a clearly defined research problem. Similar considerations apply for approaches
that implement mechanisms for user control in recommender systems ( Ekstrand et al., 2015; Jannach
et al., 2016 ). Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree.
Therefore, the literature review will discuss only that research which leads directly to your own
project. Let's take a closer look at each of these. 1: The Introduction Section Just like any good
introduction, the introduction section of your literature review should introduce the purpose and
layout (organisation) of the chapter. The type of information you choose to mention should relate
directly to the review’s focus, whether it is thematic, methodological, or chronological. There are
many benefits to writing a literature review, from improving your research skills to gaining a better
understanding of the field you are studying. If you are writing a literature review as a stand-alone
assignment, you will have to choose a focus and develop a central question to direct your search.
This can make data integration and data quality assurance a highly challenging task, in cases where
increasingly more data sources must be combined. Writing the Literature Review: A Practical Guide
suggests these steps: Chose a review topic and develop a research question Locate and organize
research sources Select, analyze and annotate sources Evaluate research articles and other documents
Structure and organize the literature review Develop arguments and supporting claims Synthesize
and interpret the literature Put it all together What is the purpose of writing a literature review. While
the study focuses on one topic, harpoon technology, it will still be organized chronologically. If no
hotel room matches such constraints, the algorithm can relax some of the constraints so a set of
recommendations that partially matches the user's criteria can be returned ( Felfernig et al., 2015 ).
Furthermore, methods like Multi-Attribute Utility Theory can be applied to rank the remaining
candidates ( Huang, 2011 ). If the same authors, books or articles keep appearing in your reading,
make sure to seek them out. The annotations inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy and quality
of the sources cited. One of the most important benefits of writing a literature review is that it can
help you to identify gaps in the existing research. Pivotal publications: are there any influential
theories or studies that changed the direction of the field. If you’d like to get hands-on help
developing your literature review, be sure to check out our private coaching service, where we hold
your hand through the entire research journey, step by step. This step will help you work out the
structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to
existing knowledge. Organizing the body Once you have the basic categories in place, then you must
consider how you will present the sources themselves within the body of your paper. A literature
review is an overview of the topic, an explanation of how publications differ from one another, and
an examination of how each publication contributes to the. Such multi-objective settings may include
competing objectives of consumers, possible tensions between the goals of different stakeholders,
conflicts when optimizing for different time horizons, competing design choices at the UI level, as
well as system-level and engineering-related considerations. Works consulted We consulted these
works while writing this handout. However, particularly in the social sciences, thinking about
research problems from multiple vectors is a key strategy for finding new solutions to a problem or
gaining a new perspective. The traditional RS use the rating or click data alone to infer customers
preferences. The foundation of theory, as the name suggests, is where you’ll lay down the
foundational building blocks for your literature review so that your reader can get a clear idea of the
core concepts, theories and assumptions (in relation to your research aims and questions) that will
guide your study. In other words, we want to maximize the Individual Treatment Effect (ITE). The
typology of literature reviews we used herein will allow eHealth researchers, graduate students and
practitioners to gain a better understanding of the similarities and differences between review types.
In the preceding example, Falk and Mills either directly refer in the text to the author of their source,
such as Hamilton, or they provide ample notation in the text when the ideas they are mentioning are
not their own, for example, Gastil’s. An identification of future directions for research on the topic.
As mentioned earlier, when rigorously conducted review articles represent powerful information
sources for eHealth scholars and practitioners looking for state-of-the-art evidence. Argumentative
Review This form examines literature selectively in order to support or refute an argument, deeply
embedded assumption, or philosophical problem already established in the literature. Make sure the
sources you use are credible, and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in
your field of research. For example, certain countries, cities, cultures, etc.
For example, a book surveying the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may include a chapter on
the role Egypt has played in mediating the conflict, or look in the index for the pages where Egypt is
mentioned in the text. This can lead directly into your methodology section. It’s basically a keyword
specific recommender system here keywords are used to describe the items. Thus, in a content-based
recommender system the algorithms used are such that it recommends users similar items that the
user has liked in the past or is examining currently. 3. Demographic based recommender system This
system aims to categorize the users based on attributes and make recommendations based on
demographic classes. Malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing Co; 2006. Rousseau D. M., Manning J.,
Denyer D. Evidence in management and organizational science: Assembling the field’s full weight of
scientific knowledge through syntheses. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to
your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths
and weaknesses are. In real-world applications, however, optimizing the accuracy of such relevance
predictions as a single objective in many cases is not sufficient. Review the literature Some questions
to help you analyze the research: What was the research question of the study you are reviewing.
Create an organizational method to focus this section even further. The main objective of such
research is to minimize the relevance prediction error or to maximize the accuracy of the
recommendations. You Might Also Like: very good, as the first writer of the thesis i will need ur
advise. Two example use cases are discussed, (a) promoting long-tail items and (b) the consideration
of resources constraints, e.g., stock availability. For instance, a thematic review of material on sperm
whales might examine how they are portrayed as “evil” in cultural documents. Instead, multiple and
often competing objectives, e.g., long-term vs. short-term goals, have to be considered, leading to a
need for more research in multi-objective recommender systems. We can differentiate between
several types of such competing goals, including (i) competing recommendation quality objectives at
the individual and aggregate level, (ii) competing objectives of different involved stakeholders, (iii)
long-term vs. The authors here recapitulate important features of Hamilton’s study, but then
synthesize it by rephrasing the study’s significance and relating it to their own work. Use a citation
manager, such as EndNote as the repository for your citations. You can use our free APA Reference
Generator for quick, correct, consistent citations. Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge
on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research.
It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations.
Essentially, this section should only be one or two paragraphs in length. Proceedings of the 12th
ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pages 102-112. The type of information you choose to
mention should relate directly to the review’s focus, whether it is thematic, methodological, or
chronological. The annotations inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy and quality of the
sources cited. Sort through other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a
sense of what your discipline expects. The prediction error for such recommendations might be even
close to zero. Here are some suggestions on how to approach the writing of your literature review:
Think about what questions other researchers have asked, what methods they used, what they found,
and what they recommended based upon their findings. Hamilton (1988) asked students to complete
sentences that required them to fill in pronouns that agreed with gender-neutral antecedents such as
“writer,” “pedestrian,” and “persons.” The students were asked to describe any image they had when
writing the sentence. Some of the discussed beyond-accuracy metrics can actually be seen as serving
both stakeholders. Generally, reranking techniques were applied in earlier information retrieval
settings, in particular in the form of Maximal Marginal Relevance re-ranking ( Carbonell and
Goldstein, 1998 ). A basic guide to writing a literature review Here are the most common ones: 1.
This can help businesses reach the right customers with the right messages, which can lead to
improved marketing ROI.
A reference list does what the name suggests, it lists the literature you referenced in the body of your
research proposal. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as
mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or
mentor if you’re unsure). If your assignment is not very specific, seek clarification from your
instructor: Roughly how many sources should you include. In other words, you want to start laying a
little breadcrumb trail in those sections so that your discussion of the research gap is firmly rooted in
the rest of the literature review. Discusses further research questions that logically come out of the
previous studies. So, this section is where you’ll pin down what exactly you mean when you refer to
X, Y or Z in your study, as well as why you chose that specific definition. In case-based systems,
similarity functions play a central role in item retrieval. It’s also a good idea to state any assumptions
that are inherent in these definitions and why these are acceptable, given the purpose of your study.
It is used to create a research question, provide support for a thesis statement, and assistance in
answering a research question. Simply put, a research gap is any unaddressed or inadequately
explored area within the existing body of academic knowledge. Based on your reading and notes,
you can look for: Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become
more or less popular over time. Of course, the central problem for this type of system is how to
create a utility for individual users. In an earlier work in this area ( Rodriguez et al., 2012 ), the
authors describe an effort to build a talent recommendation system at LinkedIn, which not only
considers the semantic match between a candidate profile and a job but which also takes side
constraints into account, for instance, the presumed willingness of a candidate to change positions.
Be sure to use terminology familiar to your audience; get rid of unnecessary jargon or slang. How
will you further your research as a result of the review? IV. Hamilton found that people imagined 3.3
men to each woman in the masculine “generic” condition and 1.5 men per woman in the unbiased
condition. The greatest strength of collaborative techniques is that they are completely independent
of any machine-readable representation of the objects being recommended and work well for
complex objects where variations in taste are responsible for much of the variation in preferences. 2.
Content-based recommender system It’s mainly classified as an outgrowth and continuation of
information filtering research. In other words, you do not want to delve into idle speculation. The
specific goals were to investigate how outcomes are produced and, most importantly, how variations
in outcomes can be explained. In the music domain, recommending tracks of trending or popular
artists, which the user already knows, might be a safe strategy when the target metric is to avoid
“skip” events. Purpose: It serves to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of
knowledge within a particular field. Filling the empty cells that have been replaced by “?” symbol,
can be seen as a matrix completion problem where one tries to estimate the missing numbers. For
example, a review that examines literature supporting or refuting an argument, assumption, or
philosophical problem related to the research problem will also need to include writing supported by
sources that establish the history of these arguments in the literature. In such situations, it has to
assessed if the investments in more complex solutions pay off in practice. 2. Explain how you plan to
go about conducting your research. Research design and methods The objective of this section of the
research proposal is to convince the reader that your overall research design and methods of analysis
will enable you to solve the research problem you have identified and also enable you to accurately
and effectively interpret the results of your research. The annotations inform the reader of the
relevance, accuracy and quality of the sources cited. A literature review discusses published
information in a particular subject area, and sometimes information in a particular subject area within
a certain time period. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process. But
they can also be merged into a single one, and by grouping them together, we have.
The genre is thus an action thriller, which is the type of book you have reviewed. Similar
considerations can be made for other quality objectives. Objectivity -- is the author's perspective
even-handed or prejudicial. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify
relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research. Recommendations can however also
have longitudinal effects, both positive ones (such as trust building toward the platform) or negative
ones (such as filter bubbles) ( Pariser, 2011 ), and again, long-term and short-term objectives may be
competing. For example, it might be the case that there are mixed findings regarding the relationship
between two variables (e.g., job performance and work-from-home policies). Consequently,
Sheppard and Williams had to go back and add a new section to their literature review on individual
resilience factors. Use evidence In the example above, the writers refer to several other sources when
making their point. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version. These
developments have attracted customers towards online shopping. You will often see the terms “the
research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably. Therefore, there is a
growing need for appraisal and synthesis of prior systematic reviews to ensure that decision-making
is constantly informed by the best available accumulated evidence. An ideal recommender system
operating in a multi-stakeholder environment should aim to balance the objectives of different
stakeholders to ensure all stakeholders are satisfied to a certain extent. A summary is a recap of the
important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that
information. Again, offline experiments are conducted to study the accuracy-diversity (and coverage)
trade-off. Well, the research gap should serve as the core justification for your study. It also includes
key references to methodological guidelines and useful sources that can be used by eHealth scholars
and researchers for planning and developing reviews. Any lit review is only as good as the research
it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Systematic
Reviews in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide. The major problems of the existing area is
reviewed and presented from different perspectives. A description of the research design or general
approach used to guide the reading and analysis of the literature (this may be organized
chronologically, by subjects, by theoretical framework, etc.). A summary of the main themes or
arguments emerging from your critical review of the literature. Also, when considering short-term
and long-term objectives, taking measures to increase interactivity and engagement with the system
in the short term is sometimes considered beneficial for customer retention in the long run ( Gomez-
Uribe and Hunt, 2015 ). Based on our findings, most of the studies combine collaborative filtering
with another technique often in a weighted way. Your literature review should be guided by your
central research question. In recent years, a widely investigated multi-objective problem setting is the
provision of fair recommendations ( Ekstrand et al., 2022 ). Unfortunately, optimizing for fairness
turns out to be challenging, as fairness is a societal construct, and a number of definitions exist, see
Narayanan (2018). Recommender systems profit the user by creating him suggestions on things that
he's doubtless to buy and therefore the business by increase of sales. Remember that you can use our
template to summarise and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. First, exhaustive coverage
means an effort is made to be as comprehensive as possible in order to ensure that all relevant
studies, published and unpublished, are included in the review and, thus, conclusions are based on
this all-inclusive knowledge base. The structure of your literature review will depend on the style of
writing you are using. Because no shop assistant would support the process of decision-making, new
challenges arose together with easier access to goods and services.
Use a citation manager, such as EndNote as the repository for your citations. Notably, to quantify the
diversity of a given list, the authors relied on a metric which was later on called intra-list diversity in
the literature. Results indicate that the majority of systematic reviews in this particular area suffer
from important methodological flaws and biases that impair their internal validity and limit their
usefulness for clinical and decision-making purposes. I would like for a conversational AI
engagement solution for WhatsApp as the primary channel I am an e-commerce store with Shopify.
The main objective of such research is to minimize the relevance prediction error or to maximize the
accuracy of the recommendations. For example, In shopping store we can suggest popular dresses by
purchase count. If it’s your first time writing a literature review, you definitely want to use this link
to get 50% off the course (limited-time offer). The academic proofreading tool has been trained on
1000s of academic texts and by native English editors. Even when paraphrasing an author’s work,
you still must provide a citation to that work. V. Common Mistakes to Avoid These are the most
common mistakes made in reviewing social science research literature. Consequently, Sheppard and
Williams had to go back and add a new section to their literature review on individual resilience
factors. Go beyond stating what you hope to achieve through the methods you have chosen. Take
notes and cite your sources As you read, you should also begin the writing process. The authors then
use such surrogates in the objective function for the RL algorithm to optimize for those metrics. A
word of advice is to save the writing of your abstract until the very end of your research proposal
preparation. When new users come, our classifier will give a binary value of that product liked by this
user or not, In such a way that we can recommend a product to the user. Essentially, this section
should only be one or two paragraphs in length. When you find a useful book or article, you can
check the bibliography to find other relevant sources. The major problems of the existing area is
reviewed and presented from different perspectives. Although machine learning (ML) is commonly
used in building recommendation systems, it doesn’t mean it’s the only solution. Instead, researchers
often present studies that are representative of most works published in a particular area and they
consider a specific time frame to be mapped. Open Google Slides Download PowerPoint If you
want to know more about the research process, methodology, research bias, or statistics, make sure
to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples. For tips on the revising and
editing process, see our handout on revising drafts. The authors identified six main ways which
represent “educated guesses” to be tested against the data in the evaluation studies. Simply put, your
task here is to present a synthesis of what’s been done (and found) within the empirical research, so
that you can clearly assess the current state of knowledge and identify potential research gaps, which
leads us to our third essential ingredient. On a scale of 0 to 9, the action-thriller and detective genres
are assigned a 9, while other serious works are assigned a 0, and comedies are assigned a minus.
Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting Professional editors proofread and edit
your paper by focusing on: Academic style Vague sentences Style consistency See an example To
begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the
connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. This may include looking to research
outside your field. Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok Body image, self-
perception, self-esteem, mental health Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth Search for
relevant sources Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Another approach is called
Collaborative Filtering (CF) and it relies on past users’ behavior, meaning given ratings or clicked
items without requiring the creation user and item’s profiles. The literature represents background and
research developments related to a specific research question, interpreted and analyzed by you in a
synthesized way.