Conducting a literature review can be time-consuming, especially for those new to the process. If you are experienced and have published a review article, you are likely familiar with the challenges it presents. My first review paper took me six months to complete, involved three different manuscripts, and required a significant amount of reading and writing. In contrast, the second paper was completed in just a week, from manuscript to submission for review.
When reading a review paper, I suggest using a Chrome-based web browser, such as Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Brave, as it is compatible with the Google Scholar PDF reader extension. To use this extension at its maximum capacity, log in using your Gmail account, which you will use permanently while conducting the literature review, as your highlighted text and the comments or notes that you take down on the research paper PDF are going to be uploaded to your Google Scholar account database. This data can be accessed in the file available on your computer. In case you lose your research article PDF, you can retrieve your highlighted text and notes that you made on the PDF with a new copy of the file inside this extension.
I suggest using Zotero over Mendeley, as it's open-source and allows for a lot of automation that saves time and energy when citing references in a research article. For all my papers, I still use Zotero today, along with a Chrome extension that communicates with the desktop application to save the PDF and metadata for citation in MS Word. If you can program the Zotero desktop application, it can even download papers from popular sources such as Sci-Hub, a shadow library of academic papers that provides free access. If you use Obsidian, an open-source note-taking app, you can also use Zotero to cite inside the notes, and that helps you identify the actual paper instantly.
To search for research papers, several platforms are actually helpful, including Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, Semantic Scholar, and RefSeek. I particularly prefer Google Scholar because it's free, and it shows you where a free copy of a PDF is available. The algorithm also gives you exactly what you're looking for, compared to other academic search engines. If your campus has access to Scopus, it's the ultimate tool for completing your literature review, but access to this resource is limited to only a few campuses. Google Scholar has released its new AI model, Scholar Labs, which helps you narrow down a few results based on your queries, providing a brief summary of what the paper offers in response to your query.
Most researchers, including myself, use Microsoft Word, which has become an integral part of everyone's life for writing papers. However, other software programs are more powerful than Word documents, and some of them are free. One such software alternative to Microsoft Word is the LibreOffice suite, an open-source suite available for free on Windows, Linux, and macOS. If you are familiar with a bit of coding, you can use LaTeX processors for writing a manuscript, and most of the journals will provide you with a template for both Word and LaTeX.
Most researchers need to plot numerous graphs for their work, so they often turn to Origin Pro. However, if you prefer to use Python and the matplotlib library with an Excel file or CSV file, you can completely automate the plotting process and be hands-free instantly once you write your code and set it up. There are a lot of tutorials available for a wide range of graph styles, and you can even use the LLMs for coding as you want.
For a good literature review, first, do your research on how to point out your view on the particular topic and note it down in an old-fashioned way with a pen and paper or in a note-taking application. Then set your flow, how you are trying to tell the question, how you are planning to solve, how others have dealt with this situation, and how you are planning to deal with a similar problem you have. Ensure that the issue you are facing is unique to you and that no one has ever encountered it before. However, people have dealt with similar issues and found ways to address them as well. However, if you find a research paper with the same exact question and a proper answer, consider changing your PhD topic.
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