Related Work#
- Goal: Embed and contextualize your work into previously published peer-reviewed publications.
- Length: 1 - 1.5 pages
The purpose of the related work section is to embed your work into previously published peer-reviewed publications. Previous work that should be included in the related work section comprises conference, journal, and workshop publications. You should not include arxiv papers, Wikipedia articles, blog posts, or news articles. If you want to use them, put them in the introduction to motivate your work. However, they are not valid resources for the related work section. When selecting related publications, make sure to pick work that is technically related to your work, i.e., do not miss important related work and do not include unrelated work.
For the collection workflow, see Related Work: Finding and collecting related work. That page is the shared home for search strategies, reference gathering, and bibliography workflow.
Tips:
- Group related work in categories and put categories into subsections of the related work section
- Describing a previous publication in the related work section should not take more than three sentences - less is usually better
- Illustrate how your proposed work distinguishes from related work
- A good related work section is between 1 and 1.5 pages. Up to 2 pages are ok. Shorter related work sections might create the impression of being incomplete; longer sections can be interpreted as an indicator for a minimal delta publication.
Don’t:
- Cite in huge bulks -
[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]is considered bad style, try to avoid more than about 5 cites in a single block.
Structure#
- Introduction: Give a short overview of the section (1-2 sentences).
- e.g. “In this section we discuss related work in xx key areas: key area one is about; key area two focuses on; and…”
- Key Area Title: Choose a descriptive title (1 title/area)
- Key Area Body: Discuss all previous related publications in this key area (1-2 sentences per publication).
- Key Area Closing: Discuss how your proposed work is different from and extends previous related work and closes a research gap (3 - 5 sentences).
- e.g. “In contrast, our work …” or “Rather than … we do …”
- Repeat: For all key areas.
- (Optional) Conclusion Summarize how your proposed work advances the field (3-5 sentences.)
- e.g. “Our work is the first to connect key area one with key area two”
Examples: