Literature reviews are comprehensive overviews of existing knowledge on a specific topic. They synthesize current research, identify gaps, and provide context for new investigations. The primary purpose is to situate a research project within the existing body of knowledge.

A typical literature review includes the following components:

• Introduction: The introduction defines the review’s topic, research question, and scope.
• Body: The body organizes the literature into themes, trends, or methodologies, critically analyzing each source.
• Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes significant findings, identifies gaps, and suggests areas for further research.

Literature reviews are integral to theses, dissertations, research proposals, and journal articles. They help justify the research approach, ensure originality, and guide scholarly and policy decisions.

An AI tool for literature reviews

Conducting a literature review is traditionally time-consuming and labour-intensive. However, AI-powered tools offer transformative support by automating key tasks such as literature search, evaluation, and synthesis. These tools apply advanced filters, assess methodology, and perform citation analyses – helping researchers uncover thematically connected studies and sample relevant work more efficiently.

The AI research agent scienceOS goes beyond simply identifying research gaps. It also acts as an AI literature review generator, capable of assisting you in drafting well-structured reviews. Supporting both the discovery and writing phases, AI agents like scienceOS help researchers set up a review’s structure and build the foundation for deeper analysis.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to integrate the AI tool scienceOS into your literature review workflow.

Starting from scratch with “Deep research”

The “Deep research” mode in scienceOS helps generate a first draft of a literature review based on your chosen topic and criteria. This feature is beneficial for building an initial structure and guiding the writing process.

Here is how to use it:

1. Start a new chat.
2. Describe your topic and specific criteria (e.g., methodology, time frame, author).
3. Use the “Deep research” mode; the AI research agent will browse hundreds of relevant sources and generate a detailed report.

The AI-generated review will be several pages long and include key structural elements – introduction, body, and conclusion – organized around the most relevant findings. You may also copy the generated text for offline use, add the cited papers to your personal library, or continue chatting to dig deeper into individual sections.

AI literature review writing with your library

It is also possible to generate a draft report based on the sources in your personal library. Simply follow these steps:

1. Upload PDFs or an export of your reference manager to your scienceOS library.
2. Go to the project “Library chat”; when chatting with this project, the AI agent considers all sources in your library.
3. Describe your topic and specific criteria (e.g., methodology, time frame, author).
4. Use the “Deep research” mode; the AI research agent will generate a literature review based on the sources in your library. (If your library contains PDFs, citation marks will also include page numbers, allowing for easy double-checking.)

Drafting a literature review based on your library is ideal for quickly generating comprehensive mini-reviews or solid first drafts for sections like the introduction of a grant application.

Additionally, you can use the AI Action “Critical review” to evaluate what might be missing in your literature review by analysing gaps and recommending additional perspectives based on papers outside your library. For this, you need to check “Search outside my library” in the project sources of the “Library chat” project.

Generating literature reviews with projects

It is also possible to draft a report based on a subset of papers from your library by organizing your sources into collections and creating custom projects.

1. Click the plus button in the sidebar to create a new project.
2. Click “Add sources” to add one or more collections to the project. You can also enable the “Search outside my library” option.
3. Describe your topic and specific criteria (e.g., methodology, time frame, author).
4. Use the “Deep research” mode; the AI research agent will generate a literature review based on the selected collections.

Whether using the whole library or a specific project collection, scienceOS allows you to refine and build upon the generated draft easily. You can copy the draft for offline editing, continue expanding the literature review using additional AI features, or visualise the citation network of sources used to formulate the report.

An AI literature review generator

The scienceOS AI research agent supports researchers throughout the literature review process, from summarizing research papers and organizing your literature collection to amplifying insights and producing structured drafts. By integrating it into your workflow, you not only speed up your research but also elevate the quality and focus of your literature review writing.