Practical Tools to Empower Your Research - Literature
Looking into a new topic in literature can be intimidating.
You are afraid that searching, reading, and understanding the state-of-the-art will take too much of your time.
What you need, instead, is to find all the relevant manuscripts and grasp their in-depth arguments as soon as possible.
Here are some tips to achieve it.
New topic, new challenge
We have all been there.
You just started delving into a new topic and realize you know nothing about it.
You need to learn and make the most of what is available in the fastest, smoothest, and most trustworthy way possible.
This guide will give you tips to maximize four main aspects of your literature review:
Search
Summary
Trustfulness
Management
1. Search
For searching, you can start typing keywords in Google Scholar, PubMed, or Science Direct.
However, to bring your search to pro-level, you must use the boolean operators.
Some examples are:
AND = All keywords must appear (Artificial intelligence AND healthcare)
OR = At least one keyword must appear (Renewable energy OR solar power)
AND NOT = Exclude one keyword (Smartphones AND NOT Apple)
“ ” = Provide exact matches
2. Summary
In the era of AI, countless options are available to summarize papers quickly. And probably you know better than me. Here are some examples:
They are immediate to use but need a subscription. Use the free trial period to test them out.
Perfect.
You got the relevant papers. You have them summarized, but are they reliable?
Can you trust the study’s claims?
3. Trustfulness
Scite is a quick tool that tells you how that piece of research has been cited, giving you an idea of how trustworthy it could be.
Here is an example of how it looks:
Cited by 425 publications
4 supporting
124 mentioning
0 contrasting
Looks good.
The article seems trustworthy.
Now, it’s time to store it properly.
4. Management
To keep your literature organized, several reference management software are available.
The most renowned are:
Choosing one is just a matter of preference.
I use Mendeley because it is free and integrates well with MS Word.
Especially when it comes to citing, it is pretty straightforward.
These are a few of the tactics that you can implement and start using from now on in your literature reviews.
Let me know which technique or tool you use to optimize your literature tasks.
