How to do a Literature Review: Find Important Papers Faster

During a typical literature review, you will run across 100s of papers. How do you identify what is essential? This article presents four tools and methods to identify relevant literature and save hours by skipping secondary literature. My approach leverages AI to scan abstracts of 100s papers and curate a comprehensive, goal-oriented reading list. But, we also don’t neglect some traditional methods for literature search, which have their strengths.

Here we’ll dive into key methods for finding literature by using the best optimised tools for the job. Let’s get into it!

An efficient literature review is, most importantly, goal-oriented. You want to find the most relevant information on a topic and get the scientific opinion on various research avenues related to this topic quickly. The problem is that there are often 100s of papers to choose from. Not long ago, I received this email:

In my literature review webinars and courses, I always urge folks not to collect papers (Collector’s fallacy) but to instead follow a red thread that keeps track of the “intent to collect” rather than the paper. But sometimes, even with the most conservative approach, we still end up with too many relevant papers.

In this guide, I’ll go over four methods to help go through large lists of papers in order to clearly and efficiently identify what is relevant for your research topic. These methods are:

1. Scite Plugin with Zotero to identify controversial and well cited papers
2. Using Litmaps’ graph feature to visualize a paper’s importance
3. Using AI to scan through abstracts and asses importance
4. Identifying key authors or journals to follow them

Find Important Paper Fast for Literature Review

Before we get into the “review” portion of literature review (by identify relevant papers from long lists you may have already collected), I want to take a step back and look at the steps that come before this.

You’re likely already familiar with the key steps of the literature review process, which are:

1. Identify research topic or question
2. Find relevant literature
3. Analyse and synthesise literature
4. Write up results (summarise and introduce your research gap)

For most research projects, identifying the question and finding a few relevant papers are rather straightforward. Things get tricky when we face the large mountains of previously published literature, struggle to find what is truly relevant and get overwhelmed.

That’s why I’ll be focusing on these 4 methods to trim down long reading lists and find the key papers you need to know on your topic.

If you’re still on steps 1 or 2, then check out my free lit review course, which can help close the gap in finding literature for you (click the image below).

4 Methods to Find Important Papers for Lit Review Faster

Below are four different step-by-step methods to find key papers for a literature review. These are particularly useful if you’ve already accumulated quite a few papers and are having trouble prioritising what to read. We’ll look at these 4 techniques:

1. Prioritise Key Papers with Scite and Zotero
2. Visualise Relevant Papers with Literature Maps (Litmaps)
3. Use ChatGPT to Identify Relevant Literature
4. Identify Key Authors & Journals

1: Prioritise Key Papers with Scite and Zotero

The easiest way to identify relevant papers in a collection is to look at metrics: number of citations, number of references, and date. If you are using Zotero, you can install the scite plugin, which will help you break down the number of citations into mentioning, supporting, and contrasting citations. This helps identify controversial papers. The year column enables you to determine the most recent papers.

However, this method is very simple, and papers with the most citations are not always the best papers. More problematically, citations always correlate with the age of the paper. An impactful paper is, therefore, recent and has many citations—this is not easy to see immediately. This is where the following method can help: Litmaps.

2: Visualise Relevant Papers with Literature Maps (Litmaps)

Litmaps is at the core of all my literature review workflows because it has a unique graphical feature, making it the most intuitive way to discover relevant literature. First, upload your papers from Zotero (or any other reference manager) to Litmaps. To do so, you can export your papers from Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, etc. to BibTeX (every reference manager can do this). The next step is to upload that BibTeX file to a Litmaps collection:

(Litmaps released a new UI that is currently being tested. If you are reading this at a later date keep in mind that the UI might have changed. Here’s their updated guide on how to import references.)

Next, we are going to view our collection as a Litmap. That’s an abbreviation for “literature map” which lays out the papers graphically. Each axis has a meaning (you can configure it as well). The default is:

• X-axis: Date of publication (old on the left to new on the right)
• Y-axis: Number of citations (many at the top, few at the bottom)
• Size of bubbles: Number of references (the more references the more likely it is a review paper)

You can drag and rearrange the map to get a better overview as well:

The visual Litmaps helps you to immediately see what is essential. Important papers will be at the top right. They are recent and have many citations. Papers in big bubbles will be review papers, as review papers always have many more references than others. It is not unusual for a reference paper to cite 300+ studies, but it is relatively rare for a method or a results paper.

Now, you can go ahead and cherry-pick the most interesting papers at the top right and discard those on the bottom left. While great in practice, you can still miss work that is relevant only to a small audience, which may be very relevant to you. In New Zealand, for example, Mātauranga Māori describes the body of indigenous knowledge around ecological topics. This is very relevant to New Zealand ecology but less applicable outside of New Zealand. Consequentially these papers will get very few national citations and you might miss them in your review, despite their inherent relevance. Using your intuition is the only way around it.

3: Use ChatGPT to Identify Relevant Literature

AI is becoming increasingly powerful and can save you hours on the literature review. While ChatGPT can read a paper in milliseconds it does not understand it deeply. You can leverage this by letting it read over 100s of papers (or their abstracts) and ask it to sort them semantically (i.e., by content). This allows us to create a reading list that is organised by meaning, not citations. This workflow requires you to have all your papers in Zotero or any other reference manager.

First, you need to export your collection from Zotero to a BibTeX file. This is a text file containing the title, abstract, year, and authors. Select “export notes” to export your own notes, too. Here is how it looks in Zotero:

Next, you are going to rename the file from *.bib to *txt. You will notice that you can now open it with any text editor. Double-check that you can see the abstracts included in the file. This will be essential for the next step. If the abstracts are not included, AI will only have access to the paper’s title to decide its contents. Continue with this workflow only if most abstracts are included. This is how this looks:

Now, we are going to upload this file to ChatGPT and ask it to create a reading list. This works because the abstracts of the papers are included in the BibTeX file, and ChatGPT has some context for each paper. It can identify closely related papers and is possibly redundant when generating the reading list. The result is not only a list of documents but also a list of learning goals. This allows you to read the paper with a question in mind and significantly improve your learning.

Here is the prompt I used in this video:

My goal is to learn how {insert your goal here}.
1. Analyze the papers mentioned in the document. Use only them and nothing else. 
2. Create a reading list that takes me from novice to advanced. Starting with broader papers and ending with very specific papers.
3. For each paper identify 2 questions as my "learning goal" based on what you infer in the abstract. 
Choose only 5 papers from the collection, as I do not have more time

If you want to improve this prompt and get better and more reliable results there are a few things you can do:

• Define a clear output format for your AI using XML and Markdown (Mentioned here)
• Describe the input format and which parts are a must-read for the AI (it might otherwise just skip reading).
• Use a more emotional language, capitalise. Yes, ChatGPT reacts to emotions.
• Prompt multiple times with a slightly changed goal description to see if there is consensus on the output.

You can learn in-depth techniques on dealing with ChatGPT for academics in the free download below.

4: Identify Key Authors & Journals

If you are starting your literature review, following an author is the easiest way to build understanding quickly. Especially one that is closely related to what you are doing. To identify your top authors, sort your Zotero collection by creator and notice recurring authors. Depending on the domain, the order of authors has different meanings. It may be alphabetical or may signify the importance.

Once you have found the relevant authors, use Google Scholar to check what else they have published and whether this aligns with your interests. You can also check the number of citations and decide how “senior” an author is. However, the number of citations is highly domain-dependent, and even related domains may have different ranges for typical citation counts. If you install the scite browser extension small boxes below each paper will tell you how many supporting or contrasting mentions each of their papers got.

Similarly to authors, you can look at the top journals in your collection and follow those. However, journals are often very broad and may not help as well as authors to narrow down what is important.

So, how you do find papers papers for your literature review?

There are many ways to identify relevant papers for a literature review. Traditionally, this was largely keyword search with traditional databases (think PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar, etc.). Today, this is rapidly changing, and using AI is becoming the new status quo. AI can read abstracts or entire papers and build an understanding of the subject matter to help guide your attention to the most important literature. Other “traditional methods” still remain relevant, as they help us prioritise based on objective values (citations, date, etc.); this is what we explored with Litmaps. A more organic option for your literature review is to follow the paper trail of single authors related to your field.

These techniques are just a fraction of what we can do with AI in research. To learn more, I recommend jumping into my free AI Lit Review & Writing Course, available here.