As I am currently working on a new space mechanism prototype and still on the concept stage one of my favourite sources of inspiration is through scientific journals.
You might need to do a literature review for securing funding for your product or service or for your corporate research project. Literature reviews are an excellent source of information for the latest state-of-the-art developments in your field. You can also use literature reviews and reviewing journal articles to learn new skills and to be inspired in your own projects. I research journals to help with concept generation and to figure out what I need to learn to tackle an issue.
Sometimes carrying out a literature review can be daunting if you aren’t familiar with the process. Luckily, I have created a simple literature review plan that you can use to help plan out your research.
Literature review plan
In the plan you would briefly describe what you are researching, the key objectives and identify the keywords in your research. If for example you are researching solar panel mechanisms for cubesats you would include cubesats, solar panels, actuators, mechanisms into your keyword search. If it doesn’t yield you the required results you can then look at refining your search by maybe using nano satellites, solar array, deployable.
The literature review plan can be found in the link
Literature review process
When carrying out a literature review, I usually scan the abstracts of each paper I think is relevant and bookmark the most promising articles. Then once I have a shortlist I would then read the results and conclusions. Based on the findings I would keep the most promising and then look more in depth with the remaining journals. If I feel I don’t have enough useful articles I will go back to my search and change my keywords and repeat the process. I do suggest not reading each article fully in the search phase as you will risk wasting a lot of time reading articles that aren’t useful or relevant in your research. Always refine and redo your search multiple times with different keywords to help you get the information you need.
If you’d like support in developing space mechanisms let’s get in touch
