AI-Assisted Literature Reviews: A Practical Video Workflow

I’ve just published a new video demonstrating my personal workflow for conducting efficient literature reviews, particularly when delving into new research areas. This guide is designed to help students and researchers quickly grasp the state-of-the-art in any field by leveraging powerful AI-driven tools.

The video provides a direct and practical approach, showcasing how to integrate various digital tools to streamline the initial stages of your literature review.

If you want a local-first companion workflow for turning meetings and interviews into searchable notes, see Distill.

Why This Workflow Works

The goal is not to replace critical reading. It is to make the first pass faster, more systematic, and easier to repeat when you are entering a new topic. By combining search, mapping, summarization, and reference management, the workflow helps you move from a broad question to a focused reading list much faster.

What the Video Covers

• Strategic Literature Search: Learn how to initiate your search effectively using platforms like Google and Google Scholar.
• Visualizing Research Connections: Discover how Connected Papers can help you map out the relationships between academic publications, making it easier to identify key works.
• AI-Powered Document Analysis with NotebookLM: See how to upload your PDFs to NotebookLM for instant summarization, intelligent prompt generation, and even the creation of audio overviews and interactive discussions based on your source material.
• Deep Research with Google Gemini: Explore Google Gemini’s deep research feature, which utilizes web-Browse capabilities to generate comprehensive reports and audio summaries on complex topics.
• Efficient Reference Management: A brief look at how I use Zotero to organize all the interesting publications I find throughout the process.

When to Use It

This workflow is aimed at significantly reducing the time typically spent on understanding a new subject and identifying core publications, ultimately boosting the efficiency of your research process. It is especially useful when you need a structured starting point before deep reading, note-taking, or writing.

Watch the Full Guide

You can watch the full video here.

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