Literature Review Apps

In my last blog post I wrote about reference managers and how they could be used to organize your literature review and help expedite in-text citating. 

They also provided some useful tools for note taking and sorting which journal articles you have read or did not read.  Even tagging them as favorites.  But the process of reading through all those journal articles can still very tedious and overwhelming.  Figuring out where to start can seem very haphazard.  To address this inefficiency in my process I started doing searches for tools used in systematic literature review (SLR).  “SLR, or Systematic Review, is a method to identify, evaluate and summarize the state-of-the-art of a specific theme.” (Mariano et al., 2017).  SLR can be used to help you figure out which of the exponentially increasing number of journal articles you are collecting should be read first.  There are several free options available that can help you put your literature collection into order by priority and relevance.  The tool I like to use, ASReview, employs aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to score my literature by relevance.  This allows me to start your reading based on the most relevant journal articles rather than just picking up a journal article at random and reading it only to find out it isn’t relevant at all.  It does require that you have Python installed on your computer (see my post on Statistical Analyses and Data Analyses for where to download and install Python), but it runs with a graphical user interface (GUI) through your browser, so no coding is required. 

Using ASReview, I have found, is really simple.  Upload a .ris file of your references which can be exported using any of the reference managers I discussed in my Reference Manager Apps post.  Then it asks you to tag at least one of your references as “relevant” and one as “irrelevant.”  This provides the program with a starting point to rank your references.  What I like about this program is that it allows the researcher to engage with it in the process of ranking.  If you click “Start Reviewing” it will give you the option of tagging more references as irrelevant/relevant and each time you do the ranking of your references is adjusted.  You can do this as many times as you like before exporting the final list.  You can also go back at any time and provide new information on relevance to restructure your ranking. This YouTube video I made shows you how to use ASReview.

With a ranked list, you can now start reading your literature in a systematic way.  But there is still a lot of dense information to go through.  To speed up the reading process and conduct a spot check on the relevance of the papers just provided by ASReview, I like using Genei.  Genei helps me read through my journal articles faster by allowing me to search documents based on keywords as well as generate notes that are tagged to specific areas of the article.  It is a nice complement to ASReview.  This short YouTube video explains how it works.  Genei is not free but does have academic pricing (₤3.99/month).