I usually suggest these tools for literature review:

Litmaps

Litmaps (https://app.litmaps.co/) can fasten up quite much your literature review and help you locate important publications along your topic; it can also create nice visualizations of how the publications that you've found are linked with other work. You can also easily keep yourself updated with the same literature citation, etc.


Paperdigest

With paperdigest (https://www.paperdigest.org), you can scan through a topic's literature in the recent year or on a broader time interval, but it'll also give you a written summary! Of course, you need to read it over and check the literature, but it can provide you with a kick-off for your research!


Elicit

You can phrase your question/hypothesis in regular English on Elicit.org (https://elicit.org/), and it'll show you a lot of relevant papers that can help. And besides that, it'll rephrase your question and suggest additional ideas or questions you might want to consider! Also, it can show you in a few keywords what the outcome was from the paper! So without actually opening tons of articles, you'll have single-sentence info from the abstract, what the listed papers are about, and a keyword about the actual output (e.g. mechanical properties, simulation, new invention, etc.).

This video highlights some of their features. Probably all of you are working on some articles that need an in-depth literature review. In this video, you can find some really nice and free services that make the process faster and give you a lot of help

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oEOa9wStjk



Reference manager

When you are working on a publication, or have read articles that might be useful, use a reference manager like Mendeley or Zotero. If you are collaborating with others, it’s better to use the same variant. Reference managers will make citations simple, and most of them have a Word plugin. Journals will require specific citation formats, and with a citation manager, it’ll be easy to switch between them, and you won’t have to do the hassle of updating it manually.

In a reference manager, you can also create folders for grouping your references, create your own reference style, or apply a citation style given by a journal.

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Effortless literature review 2.0