How To Write An Exceptional Literature Review With AI [NEXT LEVEL Tactics]

the first thing you've got to do when you start a literature review is come up with a structure you got to start with the end in mind now when you're first starting you're not quite sure what that is so the first thing I would do is head over to chat GPT and ask it for a structure so for example here I've put I want to write a literature review by organic photovoltaic device and can you help me come up with a structure for this review and chat GPT will kick out a preliminary structure for you

that doesn't mean you can add to it later but this is going to be the first step in sort of like organizing our ideas and if we come up with more themes later we can slot them in all right then so here we can see it's got the title um it's got an abstract which we'll save till later we've got an introduction background advances in materials and Technology performance and efficiency so all of these are going to be sort of like the key parts that we use to structure our literature review I would take this

and copy and paste it over to something like word or to Google Docs and then the next step is to go find literature and this actually is one of the most exciting maybe even fun parts of a literature review so the second step of organizing your literature review is trying to fill out the words and finding literature that supports the different sections of your literature review now the first thing I want to do is have a look at the structure chat gpts come up with and this one explain the basic principles and components of organic

photovoltaic devices is very important so I would literally go to an AI tool called elicit and that is elicit doom and I've typed in explain the basic principles and components so exactly what chat GPT spit out and what you can see here it's given us a a summary of the top four papers but importantly I'm organizing it by most recent I want to have a look at the most recent stuff because that is going to now allow me to have a look at derivative works and also it's going to be the most upto-date information obviously

so here I'm scanning through and I'm seeing well this one really doesn't answer my question but this one overview of high efficiency organic photovoltaic materials and devices that could be perfect as a seed paper and you'll see what I mean in a minute so I'm going to have a look at that one which is here and you can see that it sort of like does give us the sort of higher level view of what we want so then I take that seed paper I copy the DOI and I take it over to a service that

allows us to see what has referenced this paper and what is referencing this paper there are two services that I really like to use the first one is lip maps and this is this paper here so you can see that I put in this as a seed paper so here is the future of organic photov voltaics um and we can also discover more related articles but initially this is what it gives us it gives us this kind of like map of where the um actual paper is this is our seed if we go this way

this is where all later works are if we go this way this is what is all previous works and if they're up here it means that they're highly cited and if they're down here it means they're not cited very much so it's really this quadrant that I'm looking for and this one is pretty interesting to me now what I need to do is collect all of these references and put them somewhere now I've not really found a really great place that not only collects the papers but allows you to reference them so this is where

I would do two things the first thing is I would collect all of these references and i' put them in a reference manager like mlay I really like mlay I've been using it for years and it can also watch a folder so that when you upload PDFs to a certain folder it will capture it and put it in your reference manager now it's really important that we actually keep the PDF separately in like a folder on our computer and you'll see why in a minute but essentially this is what I would do to look for

re search works I would also go to discover more related articles which is here and this is something that they've recently included which is brilliant and you can see that I want recent only and it will also have a look for any sort of like related works that I should know about and this is an exploratory phase I'm going out I'm finding things I'm collecting them I'm putting them in a folder and I'm also putting them in melay those are two really important things and it's always working with PDFs if you can't find a PDF

and you can't get access to it you definitely shouldn't use something like SI Hub you definitely shouldn't use this because this is really bad and it is completely sort of like ruining Academia because it's giving you stuff for free and uh if you can't access it elsewhere you definitely shouldn't go to scub and type in the DOI here and push open because what you'll end up doing is finding the full paper and uh then you can download it as a PDF but uh yeah that is you know this is terrible so definitely don't do that

once we've got our seed map you can see that we've got loads of other stuff that we can we can sort of like get in to our our reference manager Mandalay now you have to be selective you have to kind of like you know read the abstracts this is a really long process and it's not about just sort of like slotting in stuff wherever you really do have to be quite sort of like targeted remember for this one we're after high level information because we're filling out the explain the background principles and components of um

organic photovoltaic devices and so this is what we need to find so some of these aren't going to be useful you can see all of the different uh titles of the papers here and some of them are going to be good some of them not some of them are going to be useful for later sections but really here we're looking for the high sort of level information the review papers so that's what I'm really looking for and for each section that you're filling out you've got to kind of do the same another tool I really

like is connected papers and this is because it gives you once you've got your seed map and you put in the the DOI you can look at prior and derivative works now that's really important to me I like derivative works because you can see it's more recent papers and it means that you can kind of uh get an idea of where we're up to at the moment cuz look this one is two from 2017 recent advances in wide band Gap semiconducting polymers so that is a nice big review paper that I definitely want in this

section so I'm going through I'm saving PDFs I'm putting them in a file I'm getting them automatically added to mlay which is our reference manager and that is what I do and for each section I probably want to find 20 to 30 different papers that's just my field your field may be different but I'm looking for a good chunk of information and that will take a long time it's a really big process to go through each of these sections that chat GPT has recommended and find appropriate references but that is exactly what a literature review

is about so that is the second stage finding different papers that we can discuss in our literature review then it gets even more interesting as you're reading the papers you should definitely be taking notes in your uh Word document underneath the section that you're working on so if I saw something interesting I put it in I'd reference it with my reference manager in this case I'm using mlay but there is a way to chat to all of the documents in a section at once and this is an AI tool that I think is super powerful

and in completely underrated and not mentioned by a load of academic YouTube channels and that is Doc analyzer doai this II toour is really fantastic because it won't just spill out information and hallucinate and you'll see what I mean in a minute so here we have doc analyzer the most important thing is is that you add documents so here are some documents that I've uploaded and um it's a really inexpensive tool to to use I think it costs $8 a month for this Pro Plan but you only need it for your literature review and you

can kind of like cancel it if you don't use it through large portions of your PhD but I think you'll see that the power is well worth the money um this isn't a sponsored uh segment by the way I just love this tool and so here we are we've uploaded our documents and then the important thing is we go to labels and you create different labels so here I've got my literature review I've got all of my documents in there and then you click on chat with these documents you could set up a new label

for each different section of your literature review if you need to if you've got loads and loads of documents you know challenges and future directions applications and Market potential these are all different labels that you could put into here but I've just put them all as literature review at the moment and then I literally say chat with these documents now chatting with this AI tool is quite frustrating sometimes but in a good way and I'll show you what what because you know I wanted um what are the most important parts of these documents that's what

I asked it and it said to identify the important parts of the documents I would need more specific keywords now this is really good initially I was frustrated but listen it's good because it's not just like hallucinating and making stuff up it wants to give you important information but it needs more from you to make sure it's giving you valuable information and this is so good it's not just going to make stuff up to appease you like some other AI tools will so here we've got actually I'd like a summary of the key findings then

he's like no could you please specify which document or page you're referring to so I'm like okay maybe I need to be super specific and then what is the effect of a calcium electrode i o capital a naughty me bad chemist okay so the effect of a calcium L uh cathode and then it gives me the information and then here this is the exact thing that I want to talk about okay do you remember from the very beginning I've got here explain the basic principles and components of photo device as well once you've got all

the literature you think will answer that question bundle it all together upload it to this tool and you'll see that you can then just get an answer that then you can use to frame your own response in your literature review so here it says explain the basic principles and components of an organic photovoltaic device I took that directly from the chat GPT prompt the structure we've been working on and here it says the basic principles blah blah blah are discussed in the documents and then from here it's essentially just a real really nice answer with

references and it says where it's finding it page one page one page two page two this is fantastic this tells you exactly where it's getting the information from and then all I would do is copy and paste this into my draft literature review and then I would replace these red bits with the actual citation using my citation manager in this case mlay and it's as easy as that so another bit I want to know about efficiency so down here it says performance and efficiency discuss how the efficiency is measured and present data on the current

efficiency levels I was like I wonder if it can do that looking across all of the uh papers I've uploaded so I just said present data on the key efficiency levels and once again it's like well you know I could do that but what do you actually want and once again initially I was like oh I'm so frustrated but no this is good because what I really wanted was the power Co conversion efficiency and it said okay I can provide the blah blah blah but this isn't explicitly available in the cont cont provided brilliant this

tells me I need to upload more information if I want to get this out of the document so it helps you write a really robust literature review and here I said explore factors that impact the power conversion efficiency from the documents that I have provided oh typing but it says from the documents provided several factors impact the power conversion efficiency it's got all of the different things that I've uploaded and uh overall I think it's just like a great way to question a load load of different papers and it does it so well it does

it actually better than any other tool that I've tried at the moment um go give it a go because it really is I think Super useful for a literature review when you need to get loads of data into one spot and ask it questions brilliant and then you do all of that again for the next bit so if I wanted here to look at applications and Market potential I look here and it says discuss how organic photo voltic are being used and future so I can just type that into elicit and the process starts all

over again for the next section so here we can see if I sort by most recent then we've got future of organic photoall Tex brilliant 2015 that's what I want to know about so I'm clicking on that and I'm using this as a seed paper for lip maps and I'm starting to collect that next load of information brilliant easy as that takes a while read all of the literature that you're actually citing you can't always rely on this but it's making it so much easier so there we have it that's how you write your literature

review using AI tools if you love this video remember to go check out this one where I talk about three unbelievable Technologies to actually automate the literature review process it is cheating a little bit you can't rely on automation but go check it out cuz I think there's some tools in there you'll love so there we have it that's how you write your literature review with AI let me know in the comments what you ad and also remember there are more ways you can engage with me the first way is to sign up to my

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right then I'll see you in the next video