By: Chamin Morikawa (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/writing-related-work-section-paperthesis-chamin-morikawa/)
For most students, writing about what they did on their own is not hard. But writing about others' work - which is what you have to do in the "State of the Art" or "Related Work" section - is quite hard for them. Here are a few guidelines to make this task a bit easier.
Let's lay down our assumptions before continuing. I assume that you want to write a "Related Work" section for a research paper or a thesis that describes your approach to solve some problem. Let's also assume that there are other publications that attempt to solve the same problem, but the solutions in them are not perfect. Finally, let's assume that your approach has some difference when compared to those by others, and some improvement (faster, more accurate, easier to afford, etc.).