A good literature review is about the balance of speed, depth, and planning; the ability to do any of these depends entirely on how you structure your literature review. For too many researchers, lit review becomes an endless slog of collecting papers. This is a sure way to an overwhelming nightmare. But, if you know why you want to read a paper, prioritise what you read, and collect the insights carefully, your literature review becomes easier, more enjoyable, and efficient. The root of this ease: a good structure. Here, we’ll examine the three pillars of a well-structured literature review to ensure the entire process is built on a strong foundation. The goal is to make the organisation and process feel a little bit more effortless!
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How not to write a literature review
Literature reviews are a challenge for most researchers, not only because of the synthesis skills needed to condense a body of information into “sense” but also because too much information is available. Each new paper you read offers more questions and prospective avenues than answers. If you don’t manage your literature review process clearly, you either collect too many papers, frantically skim through them without building understanding, or never finish on time.
This brings us to the root problem: over-collecting. Below shows a pyramid where every corner is a bad habit we have when it comes to literature review. The beauty is: once you balance your collection habits, reading speed, and depth, you become efficient.
Structuring Your Literature Review: 3 Keys
Luckily, there are methods to help direct your efforts and streamline the literature review process. After spending years perfecting processes and tools to assist in literature review, I believe that investing time up-front into wisely structuring your literature review always pays off, in easier knowledge access, synthesis and writing.
The following three concepts make it much easier to structure your literature review, especially in the information-gathering phase of the review:
- Stay organised with a special reading list (using Obsidian, ideally): Helps you keep track of all your work and avoid hoarding papers.
- Overview your papers with a Kanban board: Evaluate your papers by importance or topic to focus on the essential papers.
- Build Reference Maps: Instantly find key pieces of information by seeing your papers and notes in a visual layout.
Having a good system is like having a map on a hike. You always know where to go and how far it will be, and you will never get lost. Let’s get started!
1. Stay Organised with Reading Lists (Obsidian)
The first step to a well-structured literature review is using the tools and methods that support ongoing growth. After years of in-depth experimentation, I’ve found Obsidian to be the optimal note-taking tool for academics, and the perfect tool to organise a literature review.
However, even if you don’t use Obsidian, you can still use the fundamental underlying technique of specialised reading lists. These are not just lists of all the papers you’d like to read. I’ll go into exactly what to keep track of and why.
1.a Select the Best Tool for Your Entire Lit Review
First and foremost, you need a platform to write down your notes. Pen and paper, post-its, and stacks of papers with highlights are often quick and efficient, but they don’t scale very well, in my opinion. This is why using digital note-taking apps is an advantage. There are a number of objective reasons why every academic can benefit from digital note-taking.
It’s critical you choose a software that helps you structure your literature review in the most optimal way. You’ll want your notes to be searchable and visually organised for a quick overview. This is why I suggest Obsidian, which offers great flexibility and can accommodate the structure academics require without much hassle.
👉 If you are new to Obsidian, check out my free note-taking course to learn everything you, as an academic, need to know.
1.b Create Your Goal-Driven Reading List
When you start your literature review, you will have many papers you want and need to read, and by the time you get to even the 3rd or 4th on your list, you have already forgotten why you wanted to read the 5th paper on the list. Maybe you decide to treat this next paper as relevant and trust your past self. As days turn into weeks and months, your list of relevant papers has grown, and you realise you won’t be able to read all of them. This is quite often the time when panic sets in.
But luckily, most papers are not that important. For example, I use machine learning to study how forests in New Zealand change in response to climate change. One peripheral paper, e.g., “McGlone 2010”, is on the botanical nuances of New Zealand’s forests. I am not a botanist, so the paper is mainly irrelevant, but I needed a citation to prove that “New Zealand’s forests are mostly evergreen forests (McGlone 2010)”. Is it a good use of your time if you study McGlone 2010 in detail? No. In fact, it just adds to your anxiety!
That’s why one of the most important considerations in how to structure your literature review comes at the beginning of the process, in how you collect papers. The solution is simple: Collect the intent. Don’t just download a paper to your reference manager. Instead, record why you want to read it. Then, when you pick out your next paper, you know how much time it is worth spending on this paper. If you want, you can even add a category to your reading list: “Essential” or “Peripheral,” for example.
Here is how such a list can look.
Never just download a paper “for later” but treat the act of adding/downloading this paper to your library as a reward.
1.c How to build a reading list? Tools and Methods
You can create a reading list by simply using a text editor or even a piece of paper. However, using Obsidian offers a few key advantages:
- You can add links to related concepts, related papers or even deep-link into a PDF to give yourself context.
- You can add a clickable link to the paper to find it quicker
- You can scatter your reading list across multiple notes and use the tasks or dataview plugins to pull everything into an automatic list.
This last point needs a little bit more explanation but is a key element of my system.
Reading list entries are valuable notes too
You might be surprised why I suggest scattering your reading list across multiple notes. Let’s return to my example of using “McGlone 2010” as a citation for “New Zealand’s unique, evergreen vegetation”. Somewhere, I have a note on forests. This note contains a section on New Zealand’s forests in particular, but I have not written anything there yet. Rather than leaving it empty, I can add the “McGlone 2010” paper as a reading task there. Now, if I stumble upon my note on forests, I know where to get more answers. So the reading list entry doubles as a piece of useful information in a different context outside of my current literature review and even after have read it this note remains there and I know where to look!
2. Use Kanban to organise your papers
Your reading list can quickly grow out of control, and you might want to introduce categories. These can be importance categories or topical categories. Obsidian’s Kanban plugin is the natural progression from this state. It transforms a list with a few headings into a board with multiple columns. Each column is a heading and each card or entry in a column is one entry in the list. Here is how the transformation looks. A complete tutorial on installing this plugin can be found in this Twitter thread.
Your papers now turn into cards, and you can drag and drop them around. The original idea of a Kanban board is that cards start on the left and move to the right. In the video above, the “unread” column is on the left. Then, the card moves into one of the categories: Foundational, Interesting, or Important. After reading, it ends in the rightmost column in “Read.”
Kanban boards are a widespread way to organize a process but are equally valuable for storing information and acting as an interactive table. If you do not use Obsidian, you can use Trello. This is the most straightforward Kanban tool available. It is free to use alone or with teams of up to 10 people (e.g., a lab). Here is an in-depth tutorial on using Trello for academics. A few example boards (these have nothing to do with a literature review, but once you start using boards you can quickly get creative and organise any kind of process with it).
3. Use Reference Maps to store your insights
Until now, we have used methods to store or prioritize papers before reading. However, organising the papers you have finished reading is equally important. This makes it much easier to synthesise information later on. Aside from writing your literature review and creating connected notes, the best way is to organise them in a visual reference map. Here is how it looks in Obsidian.
This method is easy to implement and requires no plugins in Obsidian. To create a new Canvas, as these maps are called in Obsidian, you hit ctrl/cmd + P and type in “Canvas.” This opens up a menu with commands; the first command is “Canvas: Create new Canvas.” Select it to get a blank canvas. (Alternatively, find in the ribbon on the left the button for it). A Canvas is stored inside a file, just like a regular note in Obsidian.
What is a reference map?
A reference map clearly illustrates your papers, how they connect, and why that’s important for your topic at hand. Your central building blocks are the papers themselves.
The easiest way to build a reference map (in Obsidian) is to drag and drop PDFs directly onto the canvas. A better way, though, is to use source notes. These are notes you create on a single paper with summaries, authors’ intentions and meta information. Using your own words helps you remember better. You can also easily include the PDF in the source note and access it by hovering over the title (check out the video above).
If you’ve never heard of or used source notes, I highly suggest doing my free 21-day note-taking course. There’s nothing more transformative, in my opinion, than changing your note-taking strategy for long-term academic success.
Arranging these source notes is relatively easy, and you can also use cards that are just pieces of text on the canvas. These cards can be used to create a hierarchy of your papers. For example, here are papers on “Machine Learning in Ecology” further subdivided into review papers and example papers:
The most potent part of this method is that you can start building your argument directly on the canvas. Your storage becomes a sketch pad. In this example, Swenson 2020 found out that trait-demography relationships are often very weak, referring to the Yang 2018 paper (this is how I found out about it). After doing some more digging, I found out that Lynn 2023 found an explanation for this weak relationship. The story of your literature review emerges through these connections. Litmaps is an excellent tool for uncovering these hidden connections (you can learn all the key tools for this in my free AI Lit Review Course). This is what the result looks like:
Look at the more detailed reference map tutorial if you resonate with this method. There is an alternative note-taking app, Heptabase, which elevates the canvas aspect of note-taking. If you end up using maps more often than textual notes, check out the comparison between Heptabase and Obsidian.
Summary: Keys to Structure Your Literature Review
The key to an efficient literature review is creating a sustainable structure you can stick to throughout the process. Too often, we jump into the frantic “collection mode”, only to be left with hundreds of irrelevant papers. Instead, structure your approach to organisation to ensure your literature review scales with your knowledge and writing.
The three main enemies of your literature review are:
- Collecting too many papers as it leads to a sensation of overwhelm. Often caused by the inability to prioritize what is essential.
- Skimming papers too quickly due to time constraints as it prevents you from learning deeply about your topic.
- Reading every single paper and stalling often due to a sense of perfectionism and trying to read up on everything.
In this post, we looked at using a reading list to prevent (1) and (3). With this approach, you don’t just download the paper but write down why you want to read it. This way, even if you collect too many papers, you always know what’s inessential. Then, we used the kanban approach to sort the papers by priority, allowing us to focus on the most relevant papers and skim the rest. This helps you navigate around (2) and (3). Lastly, we created a reference map to track what we read. This enables you to synthesise the information and develop the narrative as you read. It also provides a sense of direction and makes it easy to find your literature.
💡 If you want to learn a comprehensive workflow for an efficient and productive literature review, check out my free AI Lit Review & Writing Course.
