Starting from these topics, the students extracted few keywords and experienced a bibliographic search in the SCOPUSWOSGoogle Scholar and Semantic Scholar databases.

First homework

The first assigned homework expects the students to perform the following work items:

Final work

The expected final work is a literature review. Well, may be it is too much for a 2,5 ECTS course. But we expect you to spend a good amount of time experimenting systematic bibliographic searches and the analysis that follows (and training yourself in that).
In the following chapters, there is some more about: 
  1. An approach for a systematic bibliographic searches
  2. The State-of -the-Art
  3. And the Literature Review

Bibliographic searches - an example 

Suppose that our topic is mould induced decay (rotting) of wood based and natural, organic, construction materials. We choose the WOS database and execute the following searches, exploring the results and, for each one of the searches, trying to understand if alternative, similar key-words are more effective or not
We start from one of the main keyword, and we try the following searches (TS="topic", the number in black is the number of results):
(#1) TS ="building material": 3.501
(#2) TS ="construction material": 3.032
(#3) (TS="building material") AND (TS ="construction material"): 102
(#4) (TS="building material") OR (TS ="construction material"): 6.431
Since the intersection (3) between the set (2) and (1) of papers is very little, we check their consistency (verified) and we suggest to use their union (4).
Then we consider two alternative expressions "building product" and "construction product", as follows:
(#5) TS="building product": 235
(#6) TS="construction product": 119
(#7) TS="building product" AND TS="construction product": 3
(#8) ((TS="building product") OR (TS="construction product")) AND ((TS ="building material") OR (TS ="construction material")) = 14
Also the last two intersections are very little, so we propose the following expression:
(#9) (TS="building product") OR (TS="construction product") OR (TS ="building material") OR (TS ="construction material") = 6.768
Then we go to the other field delimiting topic that may be identified with the following keywords: "rot(ting)", "mould", "fungi" and "moisture":
(#9) TS=rot: 38.486
(#10) TS=rotting: 38.486
(#11) TS="mould": 112.660
(#12) TS="fungi": 198.518
(#13) TS="moisture": 179.517
(#14) (TS="rot") OR (TS="rotting") OR(TS="mold") OR (TS="fungi") OR (TS="moisture"): 498.885
We can add few wild characters to check is the plural of the key-words, is included, automatically:
(#15) TS="rot*": 795.602 (that is really too much)
(#16) TS="rot?": 15.303 (that is really too low)
but the intrsection of #16 and #9 counts 1.646 records, so we took a look of them and we decided to avoid wild chars to "rot" and without "" because the set  #9 NOT #10 is empty (0). We have similar results with the term "moisture", while the case of the term "fungi" must be extended and include "fungus". "fungal". at the end, we choose  the following set:
(#17) (TS=rot) OR (TS=mould?) OR (TS="fung*") OR (TS=moisture) OR (TS=myco*): 682.552
and we change (adding plurals) to the following set:
(#9bis) TS="building product?") OR (TS="construction product?") OR (TS ="building material?") OR (TS ="construction material?"): 17.759
that is a dreadful number of paper but, intersected with (#17) reports a more reasonable (but still high) number: 
(#9bis) AND (#17): 1.796 
ALSO IF WE TRY TO REFINE IT, WE AREN'T ABLE to reduce significatively that number:
(#9bis) AND (#17) Refined by: [excluding] WEB OF SCIENCE CATEGORIES: ( SOIL SCIENCE OR ENGINEERING MANUFACTURING OR MATERIALS SCIENCE CERAMICS OR RADIOLOGY NUCLEAR MEDICINE MEDICAL IMAGING OR MINING MINERAL PROCESSING OR ENERGY FUELS OR TRANSPORTATION SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY OR AGRICULTURE MULTIDISCIPLINARY OR ART OR GEOGRAPHY PHYSICAL OR GEOLOGY OR MECHANICS OR AGRICULTURAL ENGINEERING OR MANAGEMENT OR FOOD SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY OR PHYSICS NUCLEAR OR GEOSCIENCES MULTIDISCIPLINARY OR MATERIALS SCIENCE PAPER WOOD OR ENGINEERING AEROSPACE OR GEOCHEMISTRY GEOPHYSICS OR AGRONOMY OR PHYSICS PARTICLES FIELDS OR TELECOMMUNICATIONS OR MINERALOGY OR AUTOMATION CONTROL SYSTEMS OR BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OR NUCLEAR SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY OR METALLURGY METALLURGICAL ENGINEERING OR MARINE FRESHWATER BIOLOGY OR COMPUTER SCIENCE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING OR COMPUTER SCIENCE THEORY METHODS OR ENGINEERING GEOLOGICAL OR ENGINEERING INDUSTRIAL OR ENGINEERING OCEAN OR PHARMACOLOGY PHARMACY OR METEOROLOGY ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES OR PHYSICS ATOMIC MOLECULAR CHEMICAL OR HISTORY OR WATER RESOURCES ): 1.330
We looked and analyzed at all the retrieved papers and we clear those deal with soil (not soil based material), ceramics and metal molding

The State-of -the-Art and the Literature Review

The term "State-of-Art"

Everybody knows what a "State-of-Art" is or should be. We can, nonetheless, spend few words about it: