Kickstart your literature review with AI 🚀
From information overload to insightful synthesis: AI's role in streamlining your literature review
If you are a researcher or a student who needs to conduct a literature review, you might be overwhelmed by the amount of papers and sources you have to read and synthesise. I've found it too easy to go down a reading rabbit hole and realise I've just wasted half a day exploring a completely different topic! Fortunately, a growing array of AI tools can help you search and synthesise literature, saving time and effort. In this blog post, I will share how I used two tools to support the early stages of my literature search and synthesis process. I’ve recorded a short screencast at the end of this post to demonstrate how I used the tools.
The first tool I used is called Research Rabbit. It is a web-based application that helps you find relevant papers for your research topic based on keywords, abstracts, or number of citations. You can also use it to snowball literature, which means finding more articles that cite or are cited by the ones you already have. Research Rabbit provides a visual summary that includes each paper's abstract, keywords, and citations so you can quickly decide whether it is worth reading. A particular strength of Research Rabbit is that you can select multiple articles and see how they are connected and then identify any key articles you may be missing in your literature review. I've also found it helpful how you can then sort the articles based on citations, ensuring you are referencing the seminal papers in the topic you are writing about.
The second tool I used in this workflow is called Lateral.io. When you have downloaded the PDFs of the literature you'd like to include in your review from Research Rabbit, Lateral.io can help you analyse and organise it. You can upload your papers to Lateral.io, automatically extracting key information such as authors, titles, abstracts, and references. You can also sort your papers into a bespoke literature review matrix, a table showing how each article relates to your research question, sub-questions, and themes. Lateral.io also allows you to annotate, comment, and share your literature review matrix with others.
Building on these two steps, I’d then use the literature review matrix I created in Lateral.io to scaffold the structure of my literature review and start writing!
Research Rabbit is completely free for students, and Lateral.io is also free to use. However, once you exceed the threshold of pages in Lateral.io, they'd like you to upgrade to a paid version. There is, of course, with all AI tools, a wide range of apps to support you in the literature review process, many of which overlap in functionality, and there may be one out there that can complete both of these steps without switching between tools. However, I felt these two tools worked quite well together, and I’ll continue to use this approach until I find a different way or someone suggests an alternative - please let me know in the comments if you have found a better approach! Good luck with your literature review 📝👏
The video below details each phase and how to use the tools.
Kickstart your literature review with AI🚀 - Watch Video
