A literature review placing your project in the context of other work is normally a significant part of a thesis. To prepare for this, early in the year you are required to submit a critical literature review related to your proposed project. The early deadline is aimed to ensure that you have adequately surveyed the literature of your chosen field and that you have a good understanding of the current concepts, controversies, etc., before you get too far into your project. The review also serves as further training in the expository style of scientific writing, which emphasises the quality of accuracy, clarity and conciseness. Weakness in writing style, choice of terms, spelling, punctuation and citation techniques can be identified and corrected at this stage, well before preparation of the final thesis.
If there is not much literature directly related to your chosen project, you and your supervisor should decide on a related topic for the purposes of the literature review so that a significant literature review is still carried out.
The literature review should be prepared in standard scientific format, including an abstract of 100-200 words length, sectioned text, and a list of references/bibliography. The document should ordinarily be 10-20 pages in length (excluding bibliography) for 12 unit projects.
Your supervisor's guidance must be sought from the outset when planning and preparing the review. Each paper that you find relevant to your chosen topic will contain a set of references, some of which will also be relevant. These will lead to other papers and so on. The result is that your advance into the literature may be by a geometric progression of papers, and obviously you then have to make decisions as to which papers/books are most important to your review. The suggested page limit is a guide to the extent of literature research expected for the review. However, the review must be more than an assembling of references under appropriate headings. When you have gathered and assimilated most of your literature, think about what arguments you would like to develop, the weakness that you see in the research to date, the confusions, etc., and then write your review of the topic citing the appropriate references. Read some survey papers in some academic journals (e.g., the ACM Computing Surveys) in the library. Your supervisor may be able to suggest useful survey articles. With regard to reference citations in the text and bibliography, the conventions followed by an IEEE or ACM journal should be adopted, selected in consultation with your supervisor.
The literature review must be submitted to your supervisor and your reader. Following assessment, the comments on the manuscript should be taken up, in the first instance, with your supervisor, and then with the reader. Relevant portions of the review may be incorporated into the final thesis.