Literature Review Paper

Due November 2, beginning of class

The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with the experience of writing a short literature review paper, as one way to help you start to think critically about how we currently (and will soon) measure a particular health-related behavior. You will gain experience writing in a style that would be suitable for publication. Your article will provide a thorough review of the current way(s) of measuring a specific behavior and a review of the papers that have been published so far that use technology or describe technology that could be used to measure that behavior in a new way.

Think of your short paper as the "go-to" article for learning about how we measure that behavior and how it will change in the future.

You should use the Sikkes paper from the readings as your guide.

• Pick a health-related behavior that you think is important to measure in the field, either to improve health research or to create more effective health interventions. You can use the same behavior you used in the earlier assignments, if you wish, or pick a new one. The behavior should be fairly narrow. As you have seen from the readings so far, there are many surveys for behaviors such as "diet" and "physical activity." You need to define your behavior narrowly enough so that you can provide thorough review within the page guidelines below.
• Find examples of the most common (or a common) paper-based surveys for assessing that behavior. You will need to track down the actual surveys used. This may require contacting the author, going to the library, using inter-library loan, etc. Sometimes it is easy. Sometimes it is not. Start early. Be persistent.
• Conduct a thorough literature search for papers on measuring the behavior you have selected. Follow the procedure used in Sikkes, and document what you do in your paper as Sikkes does. For instance, carefully develop a set of search terms and systematically report how you winnow down the number of papers to those you carefully review. Minimally, search these electronic databases (accessible from the NU Library website) for papers: MedLine, PsychINFO, IEEE, ACM, Springer, and Google Scholar. Depending on your topic you may want to search other databases as well (e.g., LexisNexis for business articles, etc.). Also generally search the web.
• You will identify many articles. Follow the Sikkes model to cut these down by reviewing abstracts. If you have selected a behavior that is relatively specific you should end up with a large but manageable number of papers to fully obtain and review.
• In most cases you should be able to obtain papers from the digital library or a web search with the specific title. If you cannot, consider the following strategies: (1) contact the author and request an electronic copy, (2) go the library, or (3) use NU's inter-library loan (which can be used to get research papers not in the library).
• Use the categories used in Sikkes (e.g., construct validity) plus any additional criterion that you identify for your particular behavioral measurement task, and review the papers with respect to those criteria.
• Your goal is not to provide a huge amount of detail on any particular paper, but rather to put the papers in context relative to one another and to organize the presentation ideas so the reader can get a comprehensive overview of the state of the art for measuring the behavior to today, as well as a sense of the technologies that are on the horizon (and the old challenges they may solve and the new challenges they may create). Many of the papers we have read so far that review measurement of a particular topic have done this, so follow those examples.
• You paper must adhere to the following format and length guidelines:
  • The paper should be written in the CHI format. You have 4 pages in this format for title, abstract, and body of the paper. You can insert tables and figures at the end of the paper and they do not count in this page limit.
  • You have an unlimited number of pages for tables and/or figures. Tables may help you summarize concepts. Again, see Sikkes for some nice examples, particularly Table 3.
  • You have an unlimited number of pages for references. (Your goal is to thoroughly mention all relevant papers, so your reference section could be quite long).
  • describing and critiquing the technology.
  • I strongly recommend that you use a reference manager such as EndNote or Refworks when working on this paper. It will make writing the paper MUCH easier and learning to use this software will help you in the future. Both programs are available from the NU Library (see the website)
• You will be graded on both content and the style of your scientific writing. You should have multiple friends proofread your work to be sure that your submission is clearly organized and free of typos and awkward wording.

Hand in the following:

• Your paper
• Copies of the relevant paper surveys you identified

Grades will follow the guidelines on the syllabus:

• A: Superior, striking, or unexpected pieces of work with excellent effort demonstrating a mastery of the subject matter and a thoughtful use of concepts discussed in class; work that shows imagination, clarity of presentation, originality, creativity, effort, and attention to detail.
• B: Good work demonstrating a capacity to use the subject matter, with adequate preparation and clear presentation.
• C: Work that is adequate but that would benefit from increased effort or preparation.
• D: Work that needs more effort.

In addition to bringing the hard copies to class, send an email of the 1-page PDF to ...@neu.edu. Name the file in this format: [your last name].litreviewpaper.pdf.