Whether you're starting on your first literature review, or your hundredth, you can streamline your search and management of literature by using Litmaps. By finding and suggesting literature visually, Litmaps lets you:

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Example Literature Review with Litmaps

Define your research question or topic

Search for relevant literature

Find starting articles

Find related literature using Litmaps

Expand and repeat your search

Evaluate the sources

Read and analyze the sources

Organize the literature

Write the literature review

Cite and reference the sources

A literature review is a summary of the existing knowledge and research on a particular subject. By identifying gaps in the literature, it provides a foundation for future research. As such, it’s a crucial first step in any research project.

A literature review serves several purposes:

Looking at existing examples of literature reviews is beneficial to get a clear understanding of what they entail. To find one, search for your topic along with the term "literature review".

Now, we'll walk through all the steps involved in how to do a literature review.

Keep in mind, a literature review isn't a straight line from the first to last step. You'll loop over some of these steps, repeating them iteratively until you're satisfied. However, this is the basic structure you'll need to successfully complete a literature review.

Let's get started!

First, identify your research question or topic, making it as narrow as possible.

In this literature review example, we're examining the effects of urbanization on the migration of birds.

Now, we get into the thick of the literature review by diving into the existing scientific publications on our subject.

There are many ways to search for literature. In this example, we'll follow a simple but comprehensive strategy with 3 steps:

Repeat these steps until you are satisfied with the coverage of sources you have. You'll know you've covered everything once you don't find any more relevant articles on your topic.

To get started, look for just one paper on your topic.

In our example, we start by searching for our topic in Litmaps. Here, we find "Bird Migration Advances More Strongly in Urban Environments".

Tip: Look for well-cited articles. In this example, our starting paper has been cited 68 times. This will make it easier to find more related literature in the next step.

Next, we'll find additional literature on our topic, by using our article from the last step as a starting point.

Litmaps finds papers for you, using your starting article(s). By looking at how your article connects to the rest of the scientific literature through citations and references, Litmaps finds relevant and important sources on your topic.

Here's how to find related literature to your initial article:

Click here for more details on how to do a search with Litmaps.

Although your initial Litmap will give you a good idea of the scientific literature related to your input article, it's only a small part of the bigger picture.

To dive deeper into your topic, click "More like this" for articles you find relevant. After you've done this for a few papers, you can hit "Refresh". Litmaps will use these articles as inputs to the search algorithm in order to find more relevant literature.

Just like before, you can save articles that seem important by Tagging them. It's easy to forget or lose track of work, so saving early and often is a good practice.

As you search for articles, you'll need to decide if they are important or not for your topic.

For each article, identify its relevance, quality and importance for your topic. The good news is you don't need to read an entire article to figure this out. Before even opening up the article, you can check the following to evaluate its importance for you:
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🔍 1️⃣ Date of publication → How recent is the paper?
Newer papers have less citations because they simply haven't been around long enough to be cited by even newer research.​

🔍 2️⃣ Citation count → This is the number of other papers that have cited this one in their work. Has it been cited heavily since publication, or overlooked by the community?

🔍 3️⃣ Journal → Do you recognize it? Is it peer-reviewed? Impactful?
Most papers on Litmaps are peer-reviewed, but some may be pre-prints.

🔍 4️⃣ Authors → Do you recognize the authors? Learn these names and you'll start to recognize the key contributors in your field.

🔍 5️⃣ Well-written abstract → Can you understand the gist from the abstract? If not, the paper itself may be a challenge to read.
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Now that you've collected some articles on your topic, and reviewed their metadata to ensure their relevance, you're ready to start reading!

Take notes on the key findings, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks used in the articles you read.

Use a research-friendly note-taking software, like Obsidian, that provide tagging mechanisms to keep track of key concepts and how they connect. The more you link your notes to one another, the better you can learn and form new ideas.

Remember, the better your notes are, the easier it will be to write up your literature review when it comes time!

As you read and take notes on your articles, make sure to keep your sources organized. In Litmaps, you can do this by Tagging articles according to themes, subtopics, or categories.

You've collected dozens, or perhaps hundreds of sources. You've reviewed each one, taken notes, and tried to stay organized throughout the process. Now, you're well-equipped to start writing up your literature review.

In this step, you'll summarize and synthesize the findings from all the sources you've analyzed. Start with an introduction that defines the research question, followed by the themes, subtopics, or categories identified. After that, provide a discussion or conclusion that addresses any gaps in the literature to motivate future research. Lastly, edit and revise your review to ensure it is well-structured, clear, and concise.

Depending on your field or project, you may have different objectives for your literature review. You could be doing a literature review to learn a new field, or to write a systematic review, a meta-analysis, or another kind of review article. Make sure to review the requirements, expectations and specific best practices for your kind of review.

This review on the Urban effects on native avifauna neatly summarizes a range of articles in a table, with corresponding notes and references for each one.
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The final the step to your literature review is to make sure you've accurately referenced all the sources you used in the literature review. Consider any referencing style requirements of the institution, journal or venue you're submitting to. APA is the most common. However, you may need to familiarize yourself with other citation styles, depending on your venue or publication goals.

To create a bibliography from the articles you've collected on Litmaps, simply export the articles from Litmaps.

You can use those exported articles directly in your writing software (for example, as a BibTeX in Overleaf). Or, you can convert the papers into a formatted bibliography using a reference manager like Zotero.

You can also include a visualization of your literature by downloading and sharing the Litmap you made - like the one below.

A successful literature review tells a brief story about the topic at hand and leaves the reader satisfied with the state of the topic, field or question up to this point in time. Most importantly, a high-quality literature review addresses any gaps in the field and frame any newly presented research to follow.

To create a high quality literature review, it's important to understand the key steps required and look at the many literature review examples available.

We hope this article provided all you to need to know to get started on your literature review - good luck!
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