The fastest way to do your literature review [Do it in SECONDS]

there are now so many awesome tools available that it just blows my mind when i was doing my phd back in the old days there wasn't this level of uh automation of search quality and there are some amazing tools that quite literally just make me say wow the first one i want to show you if you're doing your literature review and you just want to do it as fast as possible it's all taken care for you in this automated machine learning tool let's check it out paperdigest. org has this incredible tool that is a perfect place for you to start if we go in and just start typing water based organic photovoltaics we will see that it comes up with a fantastic just literature review and you can choose from the past year past five years any time and here summary of the related work it will give you ten uh citations and it will put it together in an amazing kind of paragraph now i like to choose the or work and what that will do is move you back to sort of like the beginnings of that research and then you can choose from the past five years and then you can say from the past year and i think those three different types of uh paragraphs will really help you understand where the research has been where it was kind of going and where the forefront of that research is right now you should go through and save all of the different references and start to use these as a seed for the next step now a little bit of word of warning about this tool please do not just copy and paste what it gives you it is good but it is not perfect and it still relies on you as a researcher to go and find those specific research questions and hone in on your research uh literature review sort of area because you know this is a great way to get started some people are really sort of confused about well where do you start this is where you start you can go in and get a paragraph that will summarize the most uh important and influential work around your topic brilliant then it's about reading those papers and asking yourselves questions this video is brought to you by my newsletter go check it out at andrew stapleton dot com dot a u forward slash newsletter the link is in the description when you sign up you'll get five emails over about two weeks everything from the tools i use the podcast i've been on how to write the perfect abstract the perfect daily schedule and more is exclusive content available for free so go sign up now okay so we've done the easy thing we've gone to a tool typed in a research question and it's given us three different paragraphs about the any time work the past five years and the past year now it's about reading those papers and what you've got to do is read those papers and i would jot down just on a piece of paper or a simple text document on your computer all of the questions that pop into your mind because the next tool is so powerful but you do need to give it a nudge in the right direction here we are this tool is illicit. org it's a semantic search for science and i just think it's one of the most incredible tools that researchers have right now and if you don't know about it you should so if you head over to elicit.

org the link is in the description you will ask a research question just like you would anything else just use normal language so let's have a look um what is the current state of water based uh organic photovoltaics let's give it a go all right one thing i love about this is it will also give you different questions so if you click up here it'll also say here's another one what is the efficiency of water-based organic photovoltaics how does the efficiency of blah blah blah anyway brilliant this is so good what is the market size that's another very important question that will give you sort of like an ability to write a really in-depth literature review so one thing i love about this and i will zoom out a little bit is that you can choose the takeaway from the abstract the intervention the outcome measured number of participants that sort of stuff so here you are given essentially a takeaway from abstract and that is what i use to scan these papers so fast let's have a look let's sort by uh year so that's what we really want to do here we are so 2004 2008 2016 all the way up we let's go the other way descending there we are that's what we want so 2021 citations developing photovoltaics from health and environmentally friendly solvents is a key topic of focus for research so here we are we've got a review paper already that's a perfect place to start your literature review i can't believe that this tool is so powerful so type in your question have a look at other questions make sure you've got the right information along the side and then filter you can also have has pdf which is really good and you can export in bib or dot csv for whatever service you're importing it into so now what we've done is we've used an automated tool to create a seed create a kind of foundation from what from which to build on and now we're adding to that using semantic search on illicit. org fantastic and now we need to look at well how do you actually sort of visually explore the domain and there are three tools that i really recommend trying to work out the order in which literature was released how they connect how they reference each other can be very confusing luckily these days there are tools that help you visualize how research is connected it also gives you advice on which papers you should look for next with the uh papers that came afterwards and before and it really is a fantastic way to explore the research environment that you're in the three tools that i recommend are lit maps connected papers and research rabbit let's take a look at them so lit maps here all you have to do is create a workspace create a new map i've put in one of my earliest papers from 2012 and here we can see this is what it's created for me so here is all of the different papers that are connected to it from my seed paper now if i click on my seed paper the one thing i absolutely love about this is you get these tabs here so you get the notes and then you get the references then you get the citations and then you get the other sort of like um suggestions that have been highly connected to this map so here we can click through and see things it's just incredible to me i can't believe it so i can add that to the map brilliant i can go back to my seed paper and carry on searching i love that this is all about what i already know about but it's giving me options on the periphery of things that i should potentially know about brilliant connected papers is another one here i've put in the same seed paper and you can see that it's connected the one thing i love about connected papers is that i can see the prior works and the derivative work so if i want to see what happened before all i have to do is click on prior works there it all is derivative works there it all is fantastic research rabbit is another fantastic and powerful tool a little bit more sort of like involved in terms of like navigation but here is my seed paper and then you can see explore papers the similar work it will produce a fantastic uh massive you know a navigatable thing for you and then you can click on things and it just allows you to explore the um literature in a really really user-friendly way i must say that of the three my favorite is litmaps is a clean interface is easier to navigate i think than all of the three and also it is just sort of like more user-friendly from a researcher's perspective they've really talked about and thought about what researchers need and i think they've put that at the forefront of their app so head over to litmaps. com if you're not quite sure about which one to use and i think yeah that's probably my favorite at the moment it may change so there we have it i think that is the fastest way to get your literature review started and to find all of the appropriate papers reviews thesis that you should know about now these tools are fantastic and then obviously you can export all that you find into your reference manager and that will be a whole other video on its own so remember to subscribe because i'll be talking about those in the future so essentially finding research making sure that you can use semantic search to answer the questions that pop into your mind will really help you sort of produce a summary a story of the research that currently exists now go check out my videos where i talk about um actually writing a research literature review but overall these are the tools that i would use first as soon as i delved into a new topic a new field a new whatever new research area i think it's getting incredibly exciting out there in terms of the different tools that are popping up so let me know in the comments what ones you would add to that list are there any that really really work for your research field let me know also go check out academiainsider.