Performing Literature Review

Reading achieves several aims such as establishing your work is indeed novel or innovative; it helps you to understand current theory, discoveries, debates.
It can identify new lines of questioning or investigation; and it should provide alternative perspectives on your work.
The reading will ultimately be summarized in the background sections and the discussions of related work in your write-ups.

Literature Review

A literature review is a structured analysis of a body of literature, and may cover work from several separate areas of research.
The papers should be grouped by topic, and critically discussed in a way that allows the reader to understand their contribution to the field, their limitations, and the questions that they leave open.
Begin a rough literature review as soon as you start reading, and, when you read a paper that you think will need to be discussed, add it in.
Briefly summarize each paper's contribution and the evidence used to support the claims, and also note any shortcomings or features that are of interest. For your own reference, how the work might have been done better: for example, are there obvious experiments that should have been tried, or plausible counter-arguments to the claims?
Keep in mind that your understanding of other work helps examiners to judge your abilities as a researcher.

First, use an academic search engine such as Google Scholar or CiteSeer and some well-chosen keywords to find three to five recent papers in the area.
- Do one pass on each paper to get a sense of the work, then read their related work sections.
- You will find a thumbnail summary of the recent work, and perhaps, if you are lucky, a pointer to a recent survey paper.
- If you can find such a survey, read the survey.
Second step, find shared citations and repeated author names in the bibliography.
- These are the key papers and researchers in that area. Download the key papers and set them aside. Then go to the websites of the key researchers and see where they've published recently.
- That will help you identify the top conferences in that field because the best researchers usually publish in the top conferences.
The third step is to go to the website for these top conferences and look through their recent proceedings.
- A quick scan will usually identify recent high-quality related work.
- These papers, along with the ones you set aside earlier, constitute the first version of your survey.
- Make two passes through these papers. If they all cite a key paper that you did not find earlier, obtain and read it, iterating as necessary.

Explore Scholar.google.com
Visit the websites of research groups and researchers working in the area.
Explore important conferences to your area and search DBLP Computer Science Bibliography for papers in that particular conference.
Explore the references in the paper X, who cited that paper X via Semantic Scholar. The activity would help you to understand the current work in that field.
Keep searching and reading as separate activities.

Might sound crazy, however at the end of literature review, we should have a excel sheel with multiple columns such as

Problem paper tried to resolve
Solution they provided
What approach/ different steps they took? Can have multiple columns such defining if the approach took multiple steps
What was the initial dataset/data?
What was the output?
What tests did they perform to evaluate the program?
Where (which journal/conference) and which year they presented (helps to understand how the research area developed).

The above format would help you to write your i) thesis background, ii) paper related work section iii) SoK papers.