TLDW logo

The fastest way to do your literature review with AI

By Academic English Now

Summary

## Key takeaways - **Magic 50 papers number**: Scan titles and abstracts with exclusion criteria to narrow down to around 50 papers, the magic number needed for a really good literature review in a research paper. [03:48], [04:07] - **Always read with purpose**: Avoid reading whole papers without purpose like client Mary who read everything from search results; instead, always ask why you're reading to find info faster, like checking discussion for future research suggestions. [04:17], [05:09] - **Pyramid Apex structures review**: Define pyramid Apex as your study's aim, then build steps from general to specific: underline key topics for main sections, subtopics for subsections, and list literature examples for paragraphs. [10:13], [11:09] - **3 plagiarism avoidance principles**: Check university and journal AI guidelines; verify output as some tools like ChatGPT hallucinate fake info; never write entire text with AI, only brainstorm, structure, and improve. [01:17], [02:01] - **Kill waffling with so what**: Avoid waffling by always asking 'so what' for the key takeaway in each section; use AI in SciSpace or Jenni to summarize text, cut unnecessary words, and generate opposing arguments. [16:44], [17:56]

Topics Covered

  • Verify AI to Dodge Hallucinations
  • Scan Titles First, Read 50 Papers
  • Read with Purpose, Skip Whole Papers
  • Pyramid Structures Beat Blank Pages
  • Kill Waffling via So What Test

Full Transcript

what if I told you that there's a way to do your literature review faster that doesn't end up taking months and actually lets you get started with your

writing and submitting your paper much much faster we've tested it with over 460 plus clients at academic English now inside our published research program allowing them to do exceptional

literature reviews that their supervisors and journal reviewers actually enjoy reading and in this video I will show you how to Leverage the power of AI to do an exceptional

literature review in just four easy steps this process allows you to find the right text read them faster structure your notes and then write your

paper much much faster but before I show you these four steps to doing a great literature review with AI faster you need to know how to avoid getting your

literature review flagged for plagiarism otherwise all your hard work will go down the drain and you will also get into a lot of [Music]

trouble to make avoiding plagiarism easy I'll give you three simple principles first of all did you know that some universities have banned using AI for

research completely so check your University guidelines and find out how and if AI can and cannot be used during your research process and journals have

such guidelines as well the second thing is that some AI tools are known for hallucinating without eating mushrooms this means that they invent fake

information fake references and make inaccurate and false claims chat GPT is a prime example so you always need to verify AI output and use the AI tools

that I would recommend in this video they are much more accurate than CH GP and number three never ever write entire text using AI use AI to brainstorm ideas

to structure your literature review to improve your text but not to write a whole text for you okay so now that you know how to use AI without plagiarism

let me show you how you can do an exceptional literature review using AI following these four simple steps first of all do you feel over overwhelmed by how many texts you need to read for your

literature review or maybe you actually can't find the relevant ones well let me show you a fast and easy way of finding the most relevant text for your literature review so you neither have

too many and feel overwhelmed nor too few and cannot get started so what is that magic number of texts that you need to have for your literature review well I will tell you in a second but let me

first walk you through the process of actually getting those text first of all start by looking at the most recent papers I don't recommend that you

initially go any further than the last 5 years and then you also need to set good exclusion criteria the typical ones are the type of publication for example are

you looking just at Journal papers or also book chapters the type of study for example are you just looking at randomized control trials the methodology of studies that you will be

including in your literature review like qualitative or quantitative where the study took place in which region of the world who or what was studied in in that study that you're going to be including

or excluding in your literature review but even if you do all of this you'll still have hundreds and hundreds of papers to read and reading all of them would take a very very long time so what

you need to do is just scan the titles and the abstracts with the exclusion criteria in mind to quickly eliminate those papers that are not relevant to

your literature review and this should give you around 50 papers which is the magic number of papers that you need to read for a really good literature review

if you're doing a research paper but how do you actually read them fast if you've been reading the literature for months now I'll show you a simple process that

will 10ex your reading with AI but before I do let me show you the biggest mistake most PhD students and researchers make when it comes to reading the literature unless you solve

it no AI tool on the planet will save your literature review the other day I was talking to a client let's call her Mary who was doing um her literature review and she had so much to read and

and it was just taking forever so I asked her why she was reading what she was reading and her answer was that well

it just came up in the search so I had to read it that meant Mari was reading the whole text without any clear purpose which of course is very very

timeconsuming so what you need to do instead is always ask yourself why you are reading this will allow you to find the right information faster for example

let's say you want to know what suggestions for future research other researchers have made in previous papers so what you need to do is look at the

discussion or the conclusion section of that paper that you're reading because the suggestions for future research will be there and you never want to read the whole paper I honestly don't know a

single researcher who does it and of course you could do it even faster with AI here's how so there are two tools that I would recommend that will really

10x your reading speed and the first of them is scace the link to sign up on scace is in the description it's a free tool to get started with and and then depending on how often you use it they

also have paid plans that you can check out but how can you Tex your reading with sipas well first of all you have two options you can either upload PDF

text or get size space to find them if we get size space to find them um you can type type in a question or a relevant search query and then you will

get information on those papers that is summarized into different columns and you can also tweak those columns in here and you can add whatever it is that you're looking for that's why I

mentioned that it's so important that you know why you're reading that paper because obviously this is still a lot of information to process so you want to be very clinical with it maybe you're just

interested to see you know what were what are the dependent variables of these studies well you add this as a column and then you could potentially delete all the other columns and then

you've got a summary here so this speeds up the reading tremendously what you can also do is chat with individual um documents in here so when you click on a

document with like that you can chat with this paper and you've got um this sample questions here so again it's really important to understand why you're reading this paper is it to find

the Gap is is it to find the contributions is it to know what data set was used or something else so always think about the why so for example let's say we are interested in the

contributions of that paper so we can just click here and then siace will give us those contributions and you've got them here okay divided into nice bullet points

what you can also do is then dive a little bit deeper and ask more specific questions that are suggested by SC space so that's one way when you've got text

that you look up using s space but you can also upload your text to your library in here and once you've uploaded them you can either chat with one

document or you can chat with all of the files um in here so if I was to select all of them apart from the notebooks which um is written work um I can chat

with them so I can go to ask co-pilot and I can ask co-pilot questions in here about these um papers all of them or I can also open one

paper and then do the same that we've just that I've just shown you um in here and answer ask size Bas questions another great tool that will

help you to really speed up your reading is AVID node and in fact Avid node can do so much more than just your literature review so you could consider

using Avid node as your only go to um AI research tool for the whole research process but in terms of the literature review in here what you need to do is

actually upload papers to the library so you cannot find papers um with um Avid node but the advantage is that if you upload PDFs then actually Avid note

reads those PDFs and you're 100% sure that the information that it provides you is accurate because again it's reading those PDFs so once you've up

uploaded it um Avid note will suggest um questions um that you can that you can ask okay so if you click on chat with document you'll have lots of different questions in here what I particularly

like about it is just that apart from generic AI questions that are very similar um in s space as well you can ask specific questions that are specific

to this particular um document uh for example how many language teachers were included in Trend study in 2012 so what Avid node has done it it has already

read the paper for you and it actually prepared relevant questions but again always think about that pyramid Apex and your why so that you can ask the right

questions and find the right information faster so now that you've read the literature how do you structure your literature review if you've been staring at the blank page for ages I'll show you

a simple hack that will allow you to structure your entire literature review today and it's got everything to do with pyramids think of the pyramid Apex as

the final destination in order to get that you need to build the rest of the pyramid correctly if you don't the whole structure will collapse just like this

pyramid so what you need to do first is Define the pyramid Apex what are you going to tell the reader what is your key takeaway message so what and then

you build the Pyramid steps from General to specific so in a literature Rev the pyramid Apex is typically your aim the aim of your study and then the pyramid

steps will be will be the main topics that you need to cover in order to take the reader logically to that Aim so take the aim of your study and underline the

key words the key topics in that aim and then put them in order from General to specific these will become the main sections of your literature review and then take one of these topics and ask

yourself what specific information what other subtopics do I need to discuss in order to take the reader to that main topic and then list them and then order

them from General to specific these will become the subsections of your literature review then for each subtopic lists several examples and facts from

the literature these will be your paragraphs or your sentences within each subsection and of course you could do it way faster with AI this is how so I'll

show you two AI tools that can allow you to quickly structure your literature review the first of them is SC space that we've already seen so you need to go to the AI writer in SCP and then

click on start writing and the link to sign up on SC space for free is right below this video now it will open um a document for you and what you need to do

is click on AI writer and click on outline Builder and then what you need to do is give siace a prompt and I already have a prompt in here that I'm

just going to uh to paste okay uh but the prompt should include the information such as you know what is the thing that you're writing like um is it

a research paper or a PhD thesis chapter or maybe a review paper and then you also need to give the aim of that paper and you want to be as specific as possible so what is the aim of the paper

you're writing or of the literature review of your PhD Theses and then you should also give SI space how long that literature review should be because obviously that will determine the

outline as well so I'll put that here and then I'll click um enter and then siace has uh prepared an

outline um in here so you can see that very quickly we get a pretty decent outline uh to be honest it really includes everything that should be in the literature review and it's also

nicely structured from the general to specific what it lacks of cause is the details okay so for example um the first section is the introduction to um Native

speakerism in language education so what I could do next is actually ask um sipas to generate a paragraph about Native

speakerism for example I could ask um CPAs um about a definition in here um of um of native speakerism to continue

writing so that's one way the next tool that is really really good is Jenny Jenny is just a writing tool I say just but it's a fantastic AI writing tool but

it doesn't have all the literature review features that sspace has so the link to sign up for Jenny is in the description and Jenny is also free to start with and then depending on how

much you use it you might need to sign up on one of their paid plans and when you start a new document um first of all it will ask you what you're writing about so again you want to give it as

much information as possible uh the more information you give it the better and then to generate an outline you need to decide you know whether you want no outline but of course we don't want that

whether you want standard headings this standard headings is useful if you're writing an entire research papers because you'll get headings you know like introduction results and so on but for our purposes creative headings are

important because we just writing the literature review section of the research paper and we want headings on that specific section so we're going to click on start writing and get Jenny to

generate that document so um Jenny doesn't automatically generate the outline what you actually need to do is go to uh go

to the chat uh box ask Jenny and then put the prompt in here that that um that we had before okay to generate an outline for this particular literature

review and then send it to Jenny and that's how we're going to uh generate at um an outline and this is way more detailed than sipas as you can see because apart

from the big headings it also gives you more specific topics straight away and it tell tells you how much time you should spend on each specific topic and

then it also gives you references so for me it gives me references because I've already uploaded some references as well but it's also pulling references from um

its databases on online so this is so much more detailed than what sspace gave us and the great thing as well is that then you can start expanding on these

topics um in here and ask Jenny further questions to continue generating the literature review so I'm just going to add it to the document right here now that you've got the structure of your

literature review you need to write it if this scares you or feels overwhelming I'll show you a simple way to use AI to write your literature review but first let me show you what's the biggest

mistake that PhD students and researchers make when it comes to writing the literature review and it's got everything to do with waffles like this delicious Belgian waffle it's

delicious but it's also full of calories and really low in nutrients you see that's what most literature reviews are they are full of words I.E calories but

low on content I.E nutrients and this is called waffling to Waffle basically means to speak or write especially at Great length without saying anything important or useful so what do you do

instead of warling well you need to create a coherent and critical argument in your literature review but how do you do that marrick well the easiest way is to come back and think about your

pyramid Apex that we introduced a couple of minutes ago when you write a literature review always ask yourself so what what is the main point that I'm trying to make what is the key takeaway

message that I want the reader to walk away from this section subsection or paragraph and then cut out any unnecessary words and you can do that

with AI as well this is how so as we said it's really important to avoid waffling in your literature review so now that you've written

something in si space or in Jenny I'll just uh paste a text that um that I've written what you can get uh the software to do if you select the text and click

on AI writer you can actually actually um summarize it okay or simplify it so if I click on

summarize Jenny is going to cut it and if I like it or I'm I'm just going to insert it below just to see what it looks like so it really cut out a lot of

um sentences and it made the text much shorter so that's one way in which you can use AI to make your literature review more to the point and avoid

waffling and Jenny will do the same thing for you so um I will put the um the text that I just generated in here again okay and I'll paste it here and

then I'm going to select it and then go to AI commands and in here um you want to uh summarize it as well so it's the same

command okay and then you could replace the section now what you can also do and is what is very important in a literature review is to create a critical coherent argument where you acknowledge

other points of views so you can use ai's help to do it as well because when you select this AI can help you to write the opposing arguments when you click on that AI is going to generate some ideas

now please bear in mind that you have to ver verify ai's output uh using your own researchers knowledge and it also doesn't give you the references in here

so of course you will need to um site uh but most importantly you need to verify it and you could do something very very similar here um with Jenny if you go to

AI commands and then um right opposing argument Jenny can also do that for you now that you know how to do an exceptional literature review you might

want to publish it as a review paper this is a fantastic way to boost your citations and become a go-to Authority in your field but how do you actually do

that and how do you develop a system to publish three or more papers every single year without Journal rejections well in this video I discuss precisely

such a system that we've tested with over 460 PhD students and researchers inside our published researcher program and I guarantee that it will help you as well to publish your papers in better

journals regularly without Journal rejection so watch this video next

Loading...

Loading video analysis...