My Literature Review Workflow - Read over 200 Papers

Hi 👋 today I want to show you how to do a literature review and give you some tools to help with this. Hope you learn something 🧠.

00:00 - Intro
00:44 - Research Question
01:18 - Scopus
03:03 : Zotero
04:38 - Researchrabbit
05:32 Notion
06:18 - Synthesize

📚Resources:

Books I love:

Courses I love:

*Some of the links are affiliate links, which help me buy some extra coffee throughout the week ☕️

🙋‍♀️ Hi, my name is Charlotte Fraza a third year PhD student in Computational Neuroscience at the Donders institute in the Netherlands. With this Channel I hope to teach the world about Computational Neuroscience and give current and prospective students the tools to enter this field. I hope you enjoy the videos ❤️.

💃 Connect with me
I try to answer all the comments, but if I don't respond I'm probably in my coding cave 👩‍💻

Sub count:
📈 44,898

[nuwanda]

I use Notero, a tool that link zotero to notion for an authomatic link. It creates a database with categories and links the notes

[anneloesx]

Thanks so much for sharing. I am a third-year PhD candidate myself, and I know all too well what a struggle managing all those papers can be. This is my workflow: (1) a. capture relevant papers using PubMed notifications for specific keywords in papers relevant to my topic b. research rabbit to find connect papers c. google scholar if I am looking for something in particular. All useful papers will end up in Endnote using the Endnote capture feature (2) Read: the most important/crucial papers will be read, highlighted and annotated using my tablet and a pen. These annotated PDFs will then be exported into Logseq, using the endnote reference code as a title. This is of great help for later referencing. Using group tags, I categorize the papers by research topic. All other papers will be exported directly into Logseq and read/annotated there. (3) Tag: then I go over my highlights, and directly tag the important highlights that I want to find back later (such as research ideas) and link to other papers in my logseq database using backlinks. Also, I make a summary of each paper. The great thing about Logseq is the great pdf support; for example the highlights you take on a pdf in Logseq can be traced back to the exact place in the pdf document. This is a lifesaver and saves so much time, and the one thing I was missing in most other applications. (4) Write my own paper. Based on the paper I want to write, I'll go into my Logseq database and look at the summaries, use the tags to find the relevant sections of the papers, and collect the data I need for my own story. Still trying to automate the endnote to logseq part, but I am finally happy with this system. Tried many other things, such as excel sheets or Onenote/Endnote, but my current setup works best. Love what you do, and keep up the good work!

[johnandlissa]

Thank you for a great video. The only thing I would add is that you should take advantage of your academic librarians and the databases that they provide for you in your program. Rarely will the librarian be an expert in your personal dissertation topic but we are experts in searching the literature and we love to help. I often liken our role as being part of the pit crew for the dissertation writer (driver). We can be a valuable part of your team.

[dvorahsperlin]

A video on synthesizing the notes would be amazing!!

[sorcererstone]

This is the most comprehensive and cohesive discussion for various toolset available (and how to use them in conjunction) for researchers/students.
Beauty is all but one is freely available!!
Thank you for this walk through.

[massabranca]

Scopus seems great, thanks for the insight, Charlotte! But the humanities are not its strong suit (especially in my field, philosophy and classical studies). So if anyone knows about alternative platforms other than jstor or muse, I'd be interested to hear!

[charlesschwoerer]

Charlotte, thank you for making this video! I can't tell you how many times I've gone back to this video in the past few weeks, as I've been writing my master's thesis!

[ronron]

When I first started graduate school I tried to be systematic about tracking the literature. Then I found it was more efficient just to read. All I do is group the PDFs on a specific topic in a folder. I also no longer take notes as I read. I have not noticed any difference in the amount of effort it takes to write a paper are a grant,

[lifejourney]

Yes!!! Thank you so much for this video, it will help students so so much! I am at the end of my PhD now and I tried so many different ways of organizing the literature and my notes in them. I am finally happy with my system and the funny thing is that I am using the exact system you describe here 😄 I actually tell my students about it as well because I think it is so important to organize your literature but it is overwhelming. On a note, when I updated Zotero, it also got a lot easier to just copy and paste everything to Notion so that I have the highlighted parts and my notes in a literature database on Notion. I also just discovered how to have my codes in there as well, which is another advantage of Notion. Sometimes I have nightmares about ... what happens if Notion suddenly crashes and never works again 😵‍💫😁 Greetings from Germany!

[heehaaification]

I love seeing how people organize systems for their work so that I can add useful tips to my own workflow - thank you for sharing! Also btw, I'm in medical school, but I'm planning on matching into psychiatry and I think computational psychiatry is such a COOL AND AMAZING FIELD!!!

[julesg]

I have my Zotero automatically synced to Notion. I have the instructions of how to if you'd like me to share them.

[linacarry-ve]

If you’re working on a literature review, Immersive Translate can help. This web plugin provides quick and accurate translations for your research documents.

[maka]

Great video, thank you. Will definitely try out some of the programs, especially because I'm already working with Zotero (for the integration with R). I'm already in my last year of the Phd and still looking for something that works consistently. Main problems for me are a seamless integration of Zotero with handwritten notes taken on an android device and for me the folder system has never worked because a lot of core work actually applies to many different projects and I would never find it again. Folders by topic are also counterintuitive because most papers combine at least two topics. If anyone has a different approach for organisation, I'd be grateful to hear. :)

[qingdong]

Thank you for your video! It's not only informative but also comfortable to watch ~

[oanhphan]

this is so so so helpful to me. I love your content so much. I really need this!

[nikhilrathod]

Excellent video. Your workflow is very similar to mine. However, I transfer annotations to word and divide them into different headings and move them into respective themes to make sense. Would love to know how you synthesize everything and add your voice in a future video

[ellya]

I use notero plugin: I have a list of all the articles in zotero (or the selected maps) in a database in notion

[nailtongaldino]

I had an immediate sympathy for you, your way of explaining things, I don't know if it's you, or my lack of scientific guidance. lol...thanks (from Brazil)

[RachelScott-lx]

I finished my undergrad last year and I'm currently just starting to write a paper for a lab I volunteer in... I'm so far behind everyone else in preparing for careers/grad school, and now on top of it, idek how to research anymore (and my old system consisted of just keeping 100+ tabs open till the paper was finished...). I just keep spending hours reading papers only to get nowhere on the actual project and forget basically everything i read by the next day... its been a hopeless 4 month cycle of trying to just START on the research... I feel like such a failure and have no one to look to for guidance (no family that understands post secondary anything at all or even cares to be involved in my education or life really, and no friends or connections from my undergrad other than my thesis supervisor). Just hearing how you generally approach research has given me so much guidance I'm literally tearing up writing this. I know I seem stupid and dramatic, but taking 4 months to just START researching is absolutely crushing for someone who never missed a deadline. I'm so disappointed in myself idk whats happened to me, but your video was the first thing to give me hope that i can finally pull my slow, slacking a** back together. Thank you so much for making this video

[JFresnicola]

Thank you for your nice video :) I would really appreciate it if you could share how you synthesize exactly. Do you write down by hand in a notebook or do you use Notion as well? I believe that Notion might be the optimal approach, but somehow it feels more satisfying to write down things with pen & paper... However, it gets messy quite fast :(