My technique for Quick Literature Review
Literature Reviews were one of the most confusing things for me when I began my PhD. I would get lost in searching for papers, wallowing in tangential directions, sometimes looking at entirely unrelated stuff. Other times, I’d be trying so hard to read an article and stuck without moving forward.
From my fair share of struggle with literature reviews, I deviced a technique that helped me do quick literature surveys, especially when I needed to write a proposal or improve half-written manuscript or to understand a new method/theory. So, here you go…
1. Collecting literature: Research Rabbit App🐇
This is my go-to tool for literature discovery. In addition to quickly build a literature collection, it helps to see how all the papers in my collection are connected! This is very essential when you write your LitRev, as you will need to draw connections between different works.
Go to www.researchrabbit.ai and search the topic you need articles for, and add them to a collection.
The app will automatically suggest more papers based on your selections and will make connections between the articles in terms of authors, citations or references!
You can also look for other papers by a certain author or similar papers to the one you choose.
(Make sure to stop when you find yourself going down the Rabbit Hole ;) )
2. Extracting information: Skim & Annotate 📑
Once you finish collecting the literature,
quicky read the abstract and decide which ones are important, relevant or new.
Now and skim the chosen papers, and annotate the most important things you find. I usually go for paper and highlighters, sometimes use the annotator in Mendeley
Optional: categorize the articles and assign a colour for each.
(Don’t spend more than 10 minutes per paper. You can always go back and read the article thoroughly after completing this task)
3. Organizing thoughts: The Sticky Note Method 🗂
Here comes my favourite part. I developed this technique inspired by a lot of tools I found on the internet. The Sticky Note Method is to capture, rearrange and construct thoughts.
From the now annotated, categorized collection, write down the essence of each article in a separate sticky note.
(here is where the colour-coding might come in handy: you can use different coloured sticky notes for different categories.)
After doing this for all the papers, stick them in a board/notebook
Rearrange them till you get a coherent flow!
That’s it. Now start writing your review! ;)
