Now hiring We're looking for a Social Media Coordinator — a paid, part-time position (~4 hours/month). Learn more & apply →

Lab Guide › Research Workflow

Literature reviews

How to read and organize the literature without getting overwhelmed.

Catching up on decades of research at the start of a project can feel overwhelming; everyone felt that way at some point. What follows is how Christina reads the literature. Keep what works for you and leave the rest, with one exception.

The one non-negotiable

Use a reference manager. It will significantly improve your life. Starting one feels like a chore, but you’ll wish you had sooner. Christina uses Zotero because it’s free and easy; Mendeley and OneNote also work. There are helpful plugins for Word and Google Docs.

You can store PDFs with notes, highlights, and links. Free versions have storage limits. You can keep your Zotero library in cloud storage per this UW guide.

General tips

  • Christina almost exclusively uses Google Scholar for literature reviews. Web of Science and ProQuest work too, but she finds them a hassle.
  • A few search tricks make Google Scholar go faster and do better. If you use an AI tool to help find or summarize papers, follow Using AI and always verify against the source. Once you find a good paper, do three things:
    • Read its references. One good paper often chains to the next and cuts your search time.
    • Check who has cited it (“Cited by #”).
    • Download the citation. Cite → RefMan gives a .ris file that double-clicks into Zotero.
  • Off campus? Connect through the library VPN first.
  • Still can’t access a paper? Search the UC Davis Library and request it through the inter-library loan system.
  • Create a Zotero collection per project so papers are easy to find again.
  • If it works for you, you can keep notes directly in the reference manager.

Be cautious with AIAA papers. Conference papers are not peer-reviewed but can look identical to journal articles, so check the header or footer. It’s okay (though less desirable) to cite a conference paper; always check whether a journal version exists.

Staying current

Catching up on past work is only half of it; keep an eye on what’s new.

  • Keep a short list of keywords for your project and search Google Scholar for them once a quarter, so nothing important slips past.
  • To automate it, save that search as a Google Scholar alert and new results arrive by email.

A paper-review process

  1. Search keywords on Google Scholar.
  2. Read the abstract.
  3. Download the .ris file into a Zotero collection.
  4. Read the conclusion.
  5. Add jot notes to the file.
  6. Look at the figures and read the captions (this is why figures matter so much).
  7. If relevant, read the results.
  8. If relevant or replicating, read the methods.

Tools

A few lab favorites map how papers cite one another: Inciteful, Connected Papers, and Citation Gecko.

Spot something to improve? Anyone in the lab can edit this guide. Edit this page suggest a change how edits work

Last updated

← Back to Lab Guide overview