I Have My Hypotheses and Questions, Where Can I Find Sources?

Well, this is the part that literature research can answer!

The essence of literature research is that you collect and present information related to your thesis to the reader.

It's as if you're writing an introduction before the grand finale.

Literature research helps the outside reader understand the various tools, historical background, mysteries of techniques that are featured and used in theses.

What Can You Include in Literature Research?

You can include historical backgrounds and basic concepts in your literature research. Think about what you need to present so that even a complete outsider can understand the research part of your thesis.

Of course, you don't have to explain everything at an elementary school level, because then your literature research would be too long (I know you're just going for the character count, caught you), so it's worth presenting the more essential points.

An Example of Literature Research

Let's say you're writing a thesis about Marshall's Supply and Demand model. You'll use this model in your thesis to present certain research results.

Ask the following questions and you'll already have the basis for your literature research:

• What is Marshall's Supply and Demand?
• Why did Marshall create this model?
• What is this model for?
• What other models exist that this model can be replaced with?
• How is one model better or worse than another? (You can compare them here)
• What preceded the creation of this model?
• Why am I using this model in my thesis?

The point is to think step by step about why the thing you want to talk about exists, what preceded it, why it's useful, how it relates to my work, etc.

Where Can I Find Sources for Literature Research?

Google, Wikipedia. You'd say that first, right? But we have far more options than that.

Let's go through the options:

Libraries:

• You get access to multiple public or less public databases
• Online libraries: works in digital form e.g., Hungarian Electronic Library

Using libraries is truly advantageous, whether done virtually or not, as through them the accumulated knowledge of fields becomes easily accessible to you during research.

Journals and Professional Publications:

• easily accessible
• continuously updated
• up-to-date, valid research

It's important that when writing your thesis, articles found in journals must also be treated as sources, and for this, naturally, the exact bibliographic data of the articles must be provided.

Online Research:

The previously mentioned domestic and international digital journals, libraries can also be found

However, there's another very good site sci-hub that allows access to millions of research materials.

Not only Google exists, there's also Duckduckgo. Sometimes it gives better results than Google.

If you're looking for more "thesis-like" versions, then the well-known Google Scholar can be a great first step.

The Significance of Bibliographies

Two basic types exist:

• Bibliographic books: as bibliographic lists, they compile scientific works published within a particular field topic.
• Review of reference lists found at the end of previously published publications and theses (these generally relate much more to a specific topic)

Media-type: films, interviews

Yes, this belongs to the less known methods, but their scientific value is absolutely not negligible.

• documentary films and interviews
• through them, for example, conferences and events become accessible that most professionals cannot attend in person.

First, of course, try to explore in your native language what literary works, sources, articles, videos exist related to your topic, and then move on to international sources (English, German, or even French sources).

If you want to paraphrase English text, just throw the English text in and Pontbot will rephrase it for you.

Be careful with simple translation, because modern plagiarism checkers can detect it. Pontbot puts in so many twists that it modifies so that the English version is also different when translated back. If you want to know more about this, read our How to Avoid Plagiarism article too. Briefly, concisely: Always mark your source.

You can check whether others have written theses on your topic. This doesn't mean we take over the structure and content of another's work word for word. With this, you're only screwing yourself, you won't know what your thesis is about and you'll heavily plagiarize.

Instead, read through and highlight the keywords that relate to your topic. (If you're really pressed for time, Pontbot also has a keyword extraction function.)

Once you have your keywords, you can use for example Pontbot to generate coherent sentences from them. 🤷

I Found a Good Source, What Do I Do With It?

First of all, you always mark your source. This also suggests that you thoroughly covered the topic, using various sources.

You can copy that text part word for word that interests you (risky - there's that paraphrasing they don't notice 🤭), or examine the sentence and extract the essence from it.

Let's now try to create a new sentence from different definitions of artificial intelligence:

According to Wikipedia "Artificial intelligence is intelligence manifested by a machine, program, or artificially created consciousness."

According to Google's Avinash Kaushik "Artificial intelligence is an intelligent machine."

According to McKinsey's "Artificial intelligence is the machines' ability to possess and develop human-like intelligence."

We've only highlighted three different formulations here, but keywords can already be extracted from each to create a new sentence.

MOREOVER! You can also use the above 3 sources as a new sentence. e.g., For proper understanding of the topic, as well as to support the literature research section, to fully understand literary concepts, by comparing literary formulations of various professionals in the field, the following consequence can be drawn: blablabla

The extracted keywords from the above thoughts could be:

• artificial intelligence,
• machine,
• human-like consciousness,
• intelligence, development, use.

From this, we can create the following sentence with Pontbot: "Artificial intelligence is the study of creating computer programs capable of answering questions and performing tasks that typically require human intelligence."

You can see that Pontbot automatically searches for synonyms (machine - computer program, use - task performance) and tries to formulate the sentence.

We could go further here, what specific tasks we're talking about (for example, if my thesis wants to present an AI application, I can elaborate on that), what groups they can be classified into, etc.

If you approach your thesis this way and try to follow the Keyword - Question - Answer steps, the work will almost certainly go more smoothly.

A couple of useful tips!

It's probably occurred to you to paraphrase texts found during literature research and put them in your thesis. Always mark the original source in this case, so you can avoid plagiarism.

You can rewrite it yourself, or use Pontbot software.