Question Solved

How should I structure my literature review for a systems engineering thesis?

Back to Forum
Active 310 pts 0 followers
St Aloysius (Deemed to be University) · Posted
Educational Assessment Earth & Climate Science

Context

I am preparing to submit my first research paper to a Q1 journal (IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks). This will be my first submission and I am unsure about a few things.

Questions:

  1. Is it mandatory to submit the code and dataset along with the paper, or is that only required upon acceptance?
  2. My results show a 2.3% improvement over the SOTA baseline. Is that considered significant enough?
  3. How long does the review process typically take for IEEE Transactions journals?

I have read the author guidelines but they are somewhat ambiguous on point 1. Would appreciate guidance from anyone who has published in similar venues.

Sign in to interact

Sign in to join the discussion.

17 Replies

Oldest Top
0
Yogesh Pandey Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

FDR (Benjamini-Hochberg) is widely accepted and preferable to Bonferroni when you have many tests and limited power. The key is to be explicit about which correction you used and why.

On replication: No independent cohort is a genuine limitation but not a dealbreaker for rare disease research, where cohort availability is a known constraint. Many high-quality papers acknowledge this and still get published in good journals. Frame it as future work.

Power analysis: Yes, report it. Showing you are aware of the limitation is better than not mentioning it.

0
Nandita Ghosh Distinguished 720 pts · Accepted answer

+1 to everything said above. My experience was identical.

0
Replying to Nandita Ghosh
Karthik Rajan Growing 180 pts · Accepted answer

Marking this as the accepted answer. Incredibly helpful and specific. Really appreciate you taking the time.

0
Replying to Nandita Ghosh
Admin NITK · Accepted answer

Just to make sure I understand the Zotero workflow correctly.is the .bib file synced to Overleaf automatically every time you add a new paper, or do you need to trigger an export manually?

0
Replying to Nandita Ghosh
Karthik Rajan Growing 180 pts · Accepted answer

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this out in detail. This is going straight into my research notes.

0
Amit Joshi Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

I have a slightly different take from my experience in industry research. The reproducibility crisis is real but unevenly distributed. Fields with strong engineering culture (computational biology, ML with benchmarks) have actually improved significantly in the last 5 years. The bigger problem is in fields where data sharing is structurally difficult.clinical medicine, behavioral economics.

The ML community's move toward open code and reproducibility checklists has been genuinely effective.

0
Nandita Ghosh Distinguished 720 pts · Accepted answer

Great question.I went through something very similar in my second year.

The key insight for me was that LoRA is actually quite well-suited for NER tasks, especially in low-resource settings. I would recommend:

  1. Use LoRA with r=8 or r=16.don't go higher for 8K samples
  2. Apply LoRA to attention layers only, not the feed-forward layers
  3. Use a cosine learning rate schedule with warm-up (10% of steps)

For Telugu-English code-mixed NER specifically, you might also look at MuRIL.it is pretrained on Indian language data and often outperforms XLM-R on Indic tasks even with less fine-tuning data.

0
Gopal Naidu · Accepted answer

Flower (flwr) is the most actively maintained and research-friendly federated learning framework right now. My group has been using it for 18 months on a healthcare project with 4 hospital sites.

Strengths:

  • Clean simulation API that lets you test on a single machine before deploying
  • Good support for custom aggregation strategies (FedProx, FedNova)
  • Active Discord community with quick responses from the maintainers

For non-IID data specifically, look at the FedProx strategy.it handles heterogeneous data distributions much better than FedAvg.

0
Replying to Gopal Naidu
Amit Joshi Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

0
Replying to Gopal Naidu
Gopal Naidu · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

0
Sowmya Narayanan Active 310 pts · Accepted answer

For Zotero vs BibTeX management, I moved to Zotero + Better BibTeX 3 years ago and have not looked back.

My workflow:

  1. Zotero browser connector captures papers instantly from ArXiv, Google Scholar, ACM DL, IEEE Xplore
  2. Better BibTeX generates a clean .bib file that auto-updates whenever I add a paper
  3. Overleaf directly pulls from the .bib file via Dropbox sync

One tip: create a Zotero collection per paper/project. When you export the .bib, export only that collection to keep it clean.

0
Disha Malhotra Starting 8 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

0
Replying to Disha Malhotra
Bhavana Reddy Starting 30 pts · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?

0
Replying to Disha Malhotra
Dinesh Kulkarni Distinguished 730 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

0
Priya Nair · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

0
Fatima Sheikh Growing 95 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?

0
Lalitha Mohan Active 230 pts · Accepted answer

Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.