Tools for literature review in Computer Science

I am currently reviewing literature to survey research related to my work. Since this process requires time and effort and often happens over several months, I set out exploring ways to streamline the process and make it efficient.

Below, I have listed what I found to be helpful and useful.

First, I found these to contain practical advice and guidance on how to read and assimilate a research paper:

1. Reading How to read a paper by S Keshav
2. Then reading How to read a CS Research Paper by Philip W. L. Fong.

From the references in the paper by Keshav, I found this Literature Review Matrix designed by Iain H McLean. This matrix provides a simple and elegant interface to help break down and absorb the contents of a research paper as described by Keshav.
 
I then modified this matrix to incorporate the guidance in Fong's paper for reading publications in computer science and engineering. You can download them here: pdf and doc. 

I prefer reading papers in print than on screen. So I print a copy of this matrix, fill it up, and clip it to the front of every research paper I read and review. That way, it makes it easier to refer back and quickly recollect the reviewed papers.

Finally, I found citeulike to be an excellent tool for importing and storing publications from on-line sources such as the IEEE, ACM digital libraries. It helps me to quickly import (through their bookmarking button), record, and mark a publication for review. This is especially useful when I am looking through the citation list of a publication and I want to record those citations that look interesting for later review. I also use this site to archive and label reviewed publications so I can export them quickly to include in the bibliography section when writing a paper.

Further, citeulike also offers several useful features such as the ability to export all your stored references in formats (such as bibtex) and search for similar or related publications. All the above features are currently available in its free version.

These tools have greatly helped me in streamlining the literature review process.