State of the Art Report Guideline

  • Title
  • Name, Matr. Nr., Kennzahl
  • Date
  • Supervision and Assistance

 

  • Abstract

    • ​short summary of the content and results of the report
    • useful guiding structure: WHY have I done WHAT, HOW was it done and what are the RESULTS. (What is the problem? Why is it important? What has been done? What are the result?)
    • length: about 300 words

  1. Introd​uction

    • introduction to the general topic
    • background and motivation
    • description of the addressed scientific problem
    • explanation of fundamental terms and basic definitions
    • outline of the manuscript

  2. Related Work (include only, if related work is available)

    • presentation of existing overview literature / state of the art literature in the field
    • what was presented there? what were the main results?
    • is something open/missing?

  3. Method

    • describe how you arrived at the set of techniques presented in the Results section
    • which journals / conference proceedings / libraries / digital libraries / search engines have been searched?
    • what keywords have been used?
    • how many results were obtained?
    • what were the selection criteria? how were the relevant ones selected?
    • which ones were excluded? why?
    • were there any other constraints (e.g., year of publication, particular application area, etc.)?

  4. Results

    • present found approaches
    • find a meaningful organization/structure for this section (not by author or year)
    • use figures to illustrate each approach 
    • was the method evaluated? what were the results?

  5. Discussion

    • critically discuss the approaches presented in the Results section
    • what are the advantages of the presented techniques? what are the disadvantages? what is missing?
    • compare and relate different approaches to each other (what are the differences? what are the commonalities?)
    • what are the most commonly used methods? why?
    • provide a (tabular) overview/summary with a meaningful characterization

  6. Conclusion

    • what can be learned?
    • what is missing in the state of the art? where are gaps to be filled?
    • what are ideas for future research?

  • References

    • all resources used must be cited properly
    • list all references using an appropriate format
    • citation rules

 

Using Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT):

Academic Integrity: Students must learn that any use of generative AI must be clearly and transparently labeled, the prompts used must be disclosed, and links to the results must be provided.

It is important to understand that undisclosed use of generative AI in a student's work amounts to plagiarism.

More Information about TU Regulation:

https://www.tuwien.at/studium/lehren-an-der-tuw/digital-gestuetzte-lehre/kuenstliche-intelligenz-in-der-lehre

 

Additional hints:

  • all figures need to be cited in the text
  • self-contained figures & captions : <title>.<explanation text>
  • cite reused figures
  • strong statements need a reference or other scientific justification
  • as long as necessary to balance readability and content, but at most 20 pages
  • tips & tricks, how to write a great research paper by Simon Peyton Jones
    Microsoft Research, Cambridge
  • Direct citation (word by word)
    Not too long (not longer than 1/2 page)
    It has to be clearly visible which part of the text is the citation
    The text has to be reproduced exactly like the original (punctuation, mistakes)
    Add page number (p.#) [Baumgartner et al., 2001; p.12]

Example of a well-done state of the art paper:

Lam, H.; Bertini, E.; Isenberg, P.; Plaisant, C.; Carpendale, S.; Empirical Studies in Information Visualization: Seven Scenarios, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Early Access
Disclaimer: student works do not have to follow the rigorous standard of this paper completely.