3X Your Literature Review Speed Using FREE Tools

This workflow will help you crush your next literature review

Hi there! Today, I'll reveal the workflow that allows me to do comprehensive literature reviews by spending 3X less time. 

Doing a comprehensive literature review can be a hard and time-consuming task. It involves sifting through a vast amount of information and synthesizing it into a cohesive overview of current knowledge on a particular topic. 

Hence, optimizing your time is vital when searching for references and writing your essay or literature review for a paper or grant.

Here is my workflow that will allow you to do it on steroids: 

1. Research Rabbit - Finding Papers 

Research Rabbit is a FREE go-to app for discovering literature and visualizing their connections. This app is more user-friendly than most database search engines like PubMed, Embase, or Scopus.

In the app, you start by creating a new collection, after which you search for new articles using keywords or by pasting the title of a pre-identified paper. 

The app will then automatically make a connection map with new articles using forward and backward citations and suggest new papers based on your initial paper selections. As you find more articles, you can add them to your collection folder.

Additionally, Research Rabbit easily lets you sync and export your collection folder to Zotero - our next tool in this list. 

After collecting all articles in your "collection," you can click on "sync to Zotero," which will export your selected references to Zotero.

2. Zotero - Reference Management and Note-Taking

Zotero is a powerful, FREE, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources and then share the results of your research. 

I believe Zotero is the best tool out there for reference management and note-taking. 

Reference management:

Go to your collection of newly imported/ synced articles from Research Rabbit and do the following:

Import all open-access PDFs automatically. You can also integrate it with Sci-hub systems (if permissible in your country). Search online to do this. I may make a tutorial on this step in the future.

If you don't find specific PDFs, find them manually using your institutional access or HINARI if you are in a lower and middle-income country (LMIC).

Add these papers manually to your collection. They'll automatically pair with your references. You can add new articles to your collection with a single click if needed. Simply open the paper on a chrome tab and use Zotero's chrome extension to add it to the Zotero.

Note-taking:

After you have imported all your articles to Zotero, you can start your note-taking process. 

Double-click on the PDF in your collection, which will open it in a new tab.

After that, in each article's PDF, highlight the text you found interesting, right-click, and select "add to note." Give your note file a name. This feature lets you export the text into a seperate note while keeping original references.

Having gone through all articles, export your "note file" from Zotero to Microsoft Word or Google Docs, as shown in the next step.

3. Writing - MS Word + Grammarly 

You should now open MS Word and import your Zotero "note file" using the "Add note" feature from the Zotero pane in MS Word. 

This will bring in all your note annotations and the associated references. 

Using the Zotero pane, click on "citations." This will let you import all your references in the referencing style of your choice. 

An excellent next step is to create an outline of your write-up. Write short bullet points for each paragraph and its content. Find outline ideas online.

Now, you need to synthesize the text you imported from your notes, group and organize points, and re-write or paraphrase text while keeping your original references. 

If you are out of ideas, use some free paraphrasing tools to get ideas to restructure your text. Some tools available for free use with limited functionality include WordTune AI and Quillbot. Don't abuse these tools, please.

In the end, pass your text through the Grammarly FREE app (or alternatives) to ensure there are no grammatical errors. 

This is how you do a literature review FAST! However, expect your paper to undergo multiple revisions after your collaborators provide their feedback as my tweet below shows:

Asad Naveed @dr_asadnaveed

If your paper's folder doesn't look like this, something is wrong. #AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter #phdlife @PostdocVoice #academia #phdlife

I hope you found this helpful. If so, please give my Twitter account some love!

Thank you so much and until next time.

Regards,
Asad