How To Write A Strong Literature Review Using AI | Write In 4 Easy Steps

in the last 6 to 12 months we have seen a huge increase in the number of AI products that are released with the aim of helping students with writing your essay with assignments and with all different parts of the research writing process now it is very easy to get overwhelmed because which one should you use which one is worth paying for which one is free which one is going to give me the best results in the shortest time without having to spend so long figuring each of them out so in today's video video I'm going

through five quick and easy steps that use five different AI platforms to show you which one I'd recommend all with the aim of writing a literature review so let's get started so the first step of writing a literature review is to find appropriate literature so you have to actually do a literature search the traditional way would be to go on a platform like PubMed or Google Scholar and search for key terms and look for research papers and just kind of do that manually and set yourself a task to do it you know every week or

every few days however using the platform our discovery which actually I've got up here on my phone it's a free app that you can download um you can actually get automated research papers that are recently published right into your inbox with notifications so let me show you how you can do this so I'm going to have it on screen over here um essentially what you do is you set your feed so it's a bit like you know an algorithm essentially you set your feed and my feed as you can see I follow these topics that

I think are interesting for my particular research studies and I also you can also kind of rank it as to how important each of those topics are for you so for me I've got important topics like molecular binding but actually I don't care too much about the expression of IQ Gap one so I've made that low but I am kind of interested in it so if there's something that will come up then it will you can also say what topics you are not interested in so I definitely don't want to see anything about n wasp

for example so that's something key to remember you could then also follow certain journals that you'd be interested in so I know for example cyto skeleton that journal all the papers that are published within that journal are really relevant and very important to me so I'm following that particular Journal so you can do that and that can also kind of help with the algorithm and with recommendations and then you can also say right I am interested in okay so I'm going to the top 100 papers I'm just going to search through this and I'm going

to keep on going and find oh this one was just published that's really important when you're writing a literature it's really key that you are able to find and discuss the most recently published papers so you're not saying something that actually currently is inaccurate so I'm going to go there this is published at the start of this month and you can just really see that all the details are there you can read the abstract and then you can also tell the AL algorithm whether or not is relevant to you so that will kind of give

you more related topics um or not include that for you and then if you want you can listen to it as a an audio so that's a nice way of doing it you can also translate it to different languages and then most importantly you can export this and Export it to your referencing manager so I particularly use men so I like export to M and what this does is it will add it to my M like Library SL database automatically and so when I come to write my liter review in a few weeks time or

whenever it is I have these papers in there so I can just reference that automatically and I'm saving myself lots of time of kind of going back and forth the second step is to evaluate and select your sources so now that you've got a long list of papers you actually need to read them it's not good enough to just look at the abstract you actually need to understand what they mean and red determine what your areas of maybe the Gap literature or like your subtopics or the parts of discussion your critique that all has to

come into it and that comes into it by actually reading the papers so again traditionally you can just open the PDF have a good read you may or may understand it but today we have ai the AI platform I recommend for this is using chat PDF so let me show you how Okay so this is chat PDF it's just a bit like chat GPT really so what it allows you to do is allows you to um upload a PDF or a research paper and then you can actually ask questions about it so here's one that

I have uploaded in the past and this is a quite in-depth one it's 21 pages so there's a lot of text here and I think as someone who's maybe reading research for the first time or just like d into this topic for the first time you probably would find it a bit hard to understand so what you can do is you can ask some questions and it starts off by giving you some example questions that you might want to answer and yeah you can get a good understanding and a good starting point from there but

you can also go into more depth and kind of ask follow-up questions and say what are the limitations and summarize this paper um and explain figures as well so figure one was somewhere down here if I scroll all the way down I think it was at the end end yeah figure one was here and I just didn't understand it I didn't feel like I knew what it meant so I said explain figure one and it actually gave a really good amount of detail that I was really impressed with speaking about different colors and what they

are and what it means and kind of how it relates to the actual topic itself so you know you've got those papers and now you have to understand it and this is a great way of starting the third thing you want to do is identify themes gaps in literature and debates so now that you've like honed in and you kind of narrowed down the papers you're interested in you kind of understand the topic a bit more you've done a bit of reading you want to really craft your literature review and think about what direction it

is that you're going to be speaking in so thinking about the topics that you're going to be speaking about thinking about the organization the layout the subtopics what you're going to include and this is where you can use a platform like elicit okay so elicit is again a really great platform that I'd recommend and essentially what you can do here is you can extract data from lots of PDFs so there's three things you can do actually so first find papers extract data and also find list of Concepts so I'm just going to ask this question

here I'm going to say what is a gap in literature um about IQ Gap 1 and the cell cortex and what it does is you can either ask it to search through your research so let's say you had 10 papers that you have narrowed down and you're really interested in those papers you can upload those 10 papers and then ask a question and it gives you an answer based off of those tent papers that's really cool cuz you know that what you're giving it is where the is coming from so if you don't it can

also find papers for you so here's the final answer it's looked at four top four papers and it said that collectively they suggest the Gap is regarding the role of IQ Gap one so they've given some some research that is um relevant which is really good and then they've given the actual research papers for you as well so this is why these platforms I mentioning in this video is so different to chat GPT for example whilst that will give you an answer you are not getting references and it's not built for an academic audience here

you can see that you've got all these papers that are presented to you and it gives you the abstract summary and it kind of says why it thinks that these are relevant and yeah I think that's really interesting so this one maybe let's take a look at one of them you get good you get a nice little summary and what you can do to go even further is you can filter it out so you can for example say I only want papers after 2010 I only want review papers I only want the abstract to contain

these words you can save it and give yourself a bit of a a different answer that an answer that's a bit more refined so yeah when you're really trying to find what those uh research areas are this can be really helpful okay moving on we are starting to write now that we have all the information at this stage you want to try to generate an outline so you should have a a good idea of what you want to include so to generate an outline you can use the platform jenny. a and I've talk spoken about

this platform so many times in this channel um and I I really enjoy I think it works really well for finding outlines so let's take a look at what this looks like okay so when you start a new document on Jenny it asks you to say and kind of prompt what you're writing about today so I've said I'm writing an essay about the impact of IQ Gap one knockdown on cell cortex nucleation the more detail you give the better and then I say can you build me an outline so you don't have to select this

but if you do select this it can build you a bit of an outline that you can start from so I say start writing okay and as you can see there's the kind of outline for what I need to include for this review and what you want to do here is just take a look at what they've included and try to cross reference that with what you've read so far so you've done a bit of reading obviously and you kind of know the ideas of what you want to speak about and you kind of know

sort of the topics that you want to speak about and you can use this as a supporting so yes you need to speak about understanding cell cortex nucleation that's correct the method of IAP knockdown so if you haven't included that already that's a prompt that you need to include this definitely important the effect and Analysis the implication and then a bit more of a discussion and maybe future directions or limitations so this is a really great way of generating an outline and then inputting the information yourself uh you can even go as far as like

they can give you recommendations for how to write or what to include so for example as you can see here it's given me the first sentence I can accept it and then of course I need to make sure that I'm citing so I can add any citations that I think are relevant so if you look at these journals you can have your own library but you can look at these journals and see which one you want to add um once you've of course read them and understood them and then that just means that it's added

there and it's you know a place to start and then last but not least you actually want to start to fully write it so you've got the outline you want to start to write it you can either write it on a platform like Jenny um you can write on like using paper palal for example which is quite similar or you can just go to Microsoft Word and take everything that you've read take all the information if you're writing a literature review on Microsoft Word you can get the Microsoft Word add in for men so you're

able to very seamlessly kind of add that information into M citations and everything kind of cross reference so it isn't it feels like you're using lots of platforms where actually you really aren't our Discovery easily syncs to m m easily syncs to Microsoft Word so it's all connected to be honest and it doesn't feel like you're using that many platforms and then you start to write and also if you if you do write on paper palal you have got the add in um on word so again you can check your grammar and punctuation automatically so

like I said it's just all very seamlessly um Blended in I think different tools suit different people and based on your research area your research interest your research aims you may find different tools helpful so hopefully you might find these ones helpful in this video don't forget to give me a huge thumbs up let me know if youve tried any of them and if you find it helpful and yeah I will see you in my next video bye