Tired of spending hours and hours on how to start your literature review? You can make is FAST and EASY using an AI-powered tool called Elicit. Here's how to do it 👇

Go to elicit(dot)org and sign up for a free account.

You will see a search bar with a statement "Ask a research question." Forget about it for a minute. Instead, go to "Tasks" in the top-right corner.

In "Tasks," click on "Brainstorm research questions."

Type in a generic statement about your project. My project is on how Hans Christian Andersen's stories were read in colonial India. So, I'm going with "Hans Christian Andersen and colonial India."

Elicit will give you a number of research questions based on your input. This is absolutely amazing!!! I would've never thought of some of the questions that Elicit suggested. I don't know of any other tool that has this option. Pick a question (or two) you find interesting.

Click on the "Elicit" home tab in the top-left corner of your screen.

In the search bar, type in the question you just selected.

Elicit will show you a bunch of papers related to your question along with summaries of their abstracts.

Click on "Export as" in the top-right corner of your screen and then select "BIB."

Elicit will download a BibTeX file named "elicit-results."

Now open up your Zotero desktop app, and click on "File" and then "Import."

Zotero will ask you where do you want to import from. Click on the first option — a BibTeX file. Then press "Next."

Navigate to your Download folder and select the "elicit-results" file that you just downloaded.

Zotero will ask you if you want to import items into a new collection. Select that and then press "Next."

Zotero will create a new collection "elicit-results" with all the items from Elicit.

Select all items in the collection and then right click. Select "Find Available PDFs" from the drop down menu.

Zotero will find available (unpaywalled) PDFs and attach them to items in your collection.

If Zotero doesn't find any available PDFs, go back to Elicit. Download PDFs if there are available.

In Zotero, right click on an item. Go to "Add Attachments" and then "Attach Stored Copy of File." Navigate to the PDF you just downloaded and Zotero will attach it to the selected item in your library.

Before going further, rename the collection from "elicit-results" to the title of your project.

Double-click on a PDF to open it in Zotero's Note Editor. Now you can start annotating and taking notes.

If you don't know how to take notes in Zotero, here's a tutorial for that. This tutorial also covers how to export your notes from Zotero to MS Word.

Found this thread helpful? 1. Scroll to the top and retweet the first tweet to help your friends and colleagues who will be working on their literature reviews after the holidays. 2. Follow me @MushtaqBilalPhD for more tutorials like this.