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Mendeley is a web and desktop based application designed to help you gather, organize and cite all your references.

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• Last Updated: Aug 28, 2024 9:34 AM
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Doing a literature review using digital tools (with Notion template)

I’ve recently revamped my literature review workflow since discovering Notion . Notion is an organization application that allows you to make various pages and databases. It’s kind of like your own personal wiki- you can link your pages and embed databases into another page, adding filters and sorting them using user-set properties. The databases are what I use the most. I’ve essentially transferred all of my excel sheets into Notion databases and find it much easier to filter and sort things now. In this post, I’ll go through how I do my literature review and share a Notion template that you can use.

I like to organize my literature review using various literature review tools along with two relational Notion databases: a ‘literature tracker’ and a ‘literature notes’ matrix. You can see a flow chart of my literature review process below (it’s inspired by this post by Jenn’s Studious Life and the three pass method for reading papers which I wrote about last week in this post ):

As you can see, this process involves a couple of decision points which helps me focus on the most important papers. This is an iterative process that keeps me up to date on relevant research in my field as I am getting new paper alerts in my inbox most days. I used this method quite successfully to write the literature review for my confirmation report and regularly add to it for the expanded version that will become part of my PhD thesis. In this post, I’ll break down how this works for me and how I implement my Notion databases to synthesise the literature I read into a coherent argument.

You can click on the links below to navigate to a particular section of this article:

The literature search

The literature tracker, the literature synthesis matrix, writing your literature review, iterating your literature review, my literature review notion template, some useful resources.

This is always the first step in building your literature review. There are plenty of resources online all about how to start with your search- I find a mixture of database search tools works for me.

The first thing to do when starting your literature review is to identify some keywords to use in your initial searches. It might be worth chatting to your supervisor to make a list of these and then add or remove terms to it as you go down different research routes. You can use keyword searches relevant to your research questions as well tools that find ‘similar’ papers and look at citation links. I also find that just looking through the bibliographies of literature in your field and seeing which papers are regularly cited gives you a good idea of the core papers in your area (you’ll start recognising the key ones after a while). Another method for finding literature is the snowballing method which is particularly useful for conducting a systematic review.

Here are some digital tools I use to help me find literature relevant to my research questions:

Library building and suggestions

Mendeley was my research management tool of choice prior to when I started using Notion to organize all of my literature and create my synthesis matrix. I still use Mendeley as a library just in case anything happens to my Notion. It’s easy to add new papers to your library using the browser extension with just one click. I like that Mendeley allows you to share your folders with colleagues and that I can export bib.tex files straight from my library into overleaf documents where I’m writing up papers and my thesis. You do need to make sure that all of the details are correct before you export the bib.tex files though as this is taken straight from the information plane. I also like to use the tag function in Mendeley to add more specific identifiers than my folders.

Mendeley is also useful for finding literature related to those in your library- I’ve found quite a few interesting papers through the email updates they send out each week with ‘suggested papers’. You can also browse these suggestions from within Mendeley and use its interface to do initial keyword searches. The key is to just scan the titles and then decide whether it’s worth your time reading the abstract and then the rest of it. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of papers being published every day so being picky in what you read is important (and something I need to work on more!).

Some similar tools that allow you to build a library and get literature recommendations include Zotero , Researcher , Academia , and ResearchGate . It’s up to you which one you use for your own purposes. One big factor for me when choosing Mendeley was that my supervisor and colleagues use it so it makes it much easier to share libraries with them, so maybe ask your colleagues what they use before settling on one.

Literature databases and keyword alerts

There are a variety of databases out there for finding literature. My go-to is Web of Science as it shows you citation data and has a nice interface. I used this to begin my initial literature search using my keywords.

The other thing you can do with these kinds of tools is set up email alerts to get a list of recent work that has just been published with any keywords you set. These alerts are usually where I find papers to read during journal club with my supervisor. You can customize these emails to what suits you- mine are set to the top 10 most relevant new papers for each keyword weekly and I track around 5 words/phrases. This allows me to stay on top of the most recent literature in my field- I have alerts set up on a variety of services to ensure that I don’t miss anything crucial (and alerts from the ArXiv mean I see preprints too). Again, you need to be picky about what you read from these to ensure that they are very relevant to your research. At this stage, it’s important to spend as little time as possible scanning titles as this can easily become a time suck.

Some of the other tools I have keyword (and author) email alerts set up on are: Scopus , Google Scholar , Dimensions , and ArXiv alerts . I set 10 minutes maximum aside per day to scan through any new email alerts and save anything relevant to me into my literature tracker (which I’ll come to more later).

Literature mapping tools

There are loads of these kinds of tools out there. Literature mapping can be helpful for finding what the seminal papers are in your field and seeing how literature connects. It’s like a huge web and I find these visual interfaces make it much easier to get my head around the relationships between papers. I use two of these tools during the literature search phase of the flowchart: Citation Gecko and Connected Papers .

Citation Gecko builds you a citation tree using ‘seed papers’. You can import these from various reference management software (like Mendeley), bib.tex files or manually search for papers. This is particularly useful if your supervisor has provided you with some core papers to start off with, or you can use the key papers you identified through scanning the bibliographies of literature you read. My project is split into fairly clear ‘subprojects’ so these tools help me see connections between the various things I’m working on (or a lack of them which is good in some ways as it shows I’ve found a clear research gap!).

You can switch between different views and add connecting papers as new seed papers to expand your network. I use this tool from time to time with various different papers associated with my subprojects. It’s helped me make sure I haven’t missed any key papers when doing my literature review and I’ve found it to be fairly accurate, although sometimes more recent papers don’t have any citation data on it so that’s something to bear in mind.

Connected Papers uses a ‘similarity’ algorithm to show paper relationships. This isn’t a citation tree like Citation Gecko but it does also give you prior and derivative works if you want to look at them. All you do is put one of your key papers into the search box and ‘build a graph’. It will then show you related papers, including those which don’t have direct citation links to the key paper. I think this is great for ensuring that you’re not staying inside an insular bubble of the people who all cite each other. It also allows me to see some of the research which is perhaps a bit more tangential to my project and get an overview of where my work sits within the field more broadly.

I like Connected Paper’s key for the generated tree and that it shows where related papers connect between themselves. Again, it’s helpful for ensuring that you haven’t missed a really important work when compiling your literature review and doesn’t just rely on citation links between papers.

This is where I record the details of any paper I come across that I think might be relevant to my PhD. In some ways, it’s very similar to Mendeley but it’s a version that sits within Notion so I have some more customised filtering categories set up, like my ‘status’ field where I track which pass I am on.

Here’s what my literature tracker looks like:

The beauty of Notion is that you can decide which properties you want to record in your database and customize it to your needs. You can sort and filter using these properties including making nested filters and using multiple filters at once. This makes it really easy to find what you’re looking for. For example, say I’m doing my literature review for my ‘FIB etching’ subproject and want to see all of the papers that I marked as relevant to my PhD but haven’t started reading yet. All I need to do is add a couple of filters:

And it filters everything so that I’m just looking at the papers I want to check out. It’s this flexibility that I think really gives Notion the edge when it comes to my literature review process.

The other thing I really like about using Notion rather than excel is that I can add different database views. I especially like using the kanban board view to see where I’m at with my reading workflow:

When I add something to the literature tracker database, I scan the abstract for keywords to add and categorize it in terms of relevant topics. It’s essentially the first pass of the paper, so that involves reading the title, abstract, introduction, section headings, conclusions, and checking the references for anything you recognise. After this is done, I decide whether it’s relevant enough to my PhD to proceed to do a second pass of the paper, at which point I will progress to populating my literature notes database.

Once I’ve decided that I want to do a second pass on a paper, I then add it to the ‘literature notes’ database. This is part of the beauty of Notion: relational databases. I have ‘rollup’ properties set in the literature notes database which shows all of the things I added during my first pass and allows me to filter the matrix using them. You can watch the video below to see exactly how to add a new paper to the ‘notes’ database from the ‘tracker’ database:

During the second pass, I populate the new fields in the ‘notes’ database. These are:

Summary | Objective of study | Key Results | Theory | Materials | Methods | Conclusions | Future work suggested | Critiques | Key connected papers.

I also have various themes/questions/ideas as properties which I add a few notes on for each relevant paper. I then complete my ‘questions for critical engagement’ which are on the entry’s ‘Notes’ page and are stored in the ‘Article Template’. If you want to read more about this process, check out my ‘how to read a scientific paper’ post .

By, doing this I create a synthesis matrix where I can see a breakdown of the key aspects of each paper and can scan down a column to get an overview of all of the papers I have read. For example, if I wanted to see all of the papers about Quantum Point Contacts to get an idea of what previous work has been done so that I can identify my research gap, I can filter using the tag property and can then see the notes I wrote for each entry, broken down by section. I also have tags for my research questions or themes, materials used, experimental techniques, fabrication techniques, and anything else that comes to mind really! The more tags I have for a paper, the easier it is to filter when I want to find a specific thing.

The other property I have included in the literature notes database is ‘Key connected papers’. This is a relation but is within the database itself. So it means that I can link to the page of other papers in the literature matrix. I’ve found this to be useful for connecting to what I call ‘core’ papers. I can also filter using this property, allowing me to see my notes on all of the papers I’ve read that are related to a certain ‘core’ paper. This helps with synthesising all of the information and forming my argument.

For those papers most relevant to my research (the ‘core’ papers) I’ll also do a third pass which involves reimplementing the paper in my own words. This is quite a time-consuming task so not many papers reach this stage, but those which I have done a third pass on are the ones I know really well. My hope is that this will stand me in good stead for my viva. This process also helps me refine my research questions further as I gain a deeper understanding of the field.

I find that writing up a review is extremely intimidating, but having the literature matrix makes this process that bit easier. I won’t go into too many details as there are already loads of resources out there going into the details of writing up a review, but here’s a brief overview of my own process:

Identify your research themes

Using your literature matrix, review each research theme or question and decide which ones you are going to focus on. These will form the different sections of your literature review and help you write your thesis statement(s). You can also think about how your questions link to ensure that you’re telling a coherent story with your review.

Choose and summarize literature related to each theme

For each section, gather up the most important related literature and summarize the key points of each source. A good literature review doesn’t need to cover all the literature out there, just the most significant sources. I try to stick to around 10 or fewer key sources per section.

Critical evaluation of sources

This is where you utilize the ‘questions for critical engagement’. Make sure you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the studies you’re writing about. By doing this, you can establish where our knowledge is lacking which will come in helpful later when establishing a research gap.

Analyse each source in relation to other literature

Try to make sure that you are telling a coherent story by linking between your sources. You can go back to the literature matrix here and use it to group similar studies to compare and contrast them. You should also discuss the relevance of the source’s findings in relation to the broader field and core papers.

Situate your research in a research gap

This is where you justify your own research. Using what you have laid out in the rest of the review, show that there is a research gap that you plan to fill and explain how you are going to do that. This should mean that your thesis flows nicely into the next section where you’ll cover the materials and methods you used in your research project.

In some ways, a literature review never really ends. As you can see in the flowchart at the beginning of this post, I regularly update and revise my literature review as well as refining my research questions. At this point in my PhD, I think that most of my research questions are quite well defined, so I’m mostly just adding any newly published work into my review. I don’t spend much time reading literature at the moment but I’m sure I’ll return to it more regularly when I’m in the write-up phase of my PhD. There is a balance to be had between reading and writing for your literature review and actually getting on with your own research!

Here’s the link to my Notion Literature Review Template . You can duplicate it and adapt it however you want, but this should save you some time setting up the initial databases if you’d like to use my method for organizing your own literature review.

Here are some resources on how to do a literature review that I’ve found useful during my PhD:

• The Literature Review: Step-by-Step Guide for Students
• 3 Steps to Save You From Drowning in Your Literature Review
• How to write a literature review
• How to become a literature searching ninja
• Mind the gap
• 7 Secrets to Write a PhD Literature Review The Right Way

If you like my work, I’d love your support!

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11 thoughts on “Doing a literature review using digital tools (with Notion template)”

Thank you so much for your insight and structured process. This will help me a lot kicking off my Master Thesis.

The perfect method to organize the literature that I have read and will read in the future. I am so glad to have found your website, this will save me from thrashing around in the swamp of literature. I was already feeling the limits of my memory when I was doing my master thesis and this will be so helpful during my PhD.

Thank you so much for this detailed post! Lily 🙂

Thank you very much for this. I’m doing my undergrad atm and reading a lot of papers. This seems like an excellent way of tracking everything.

Thank you, you made my beginning less stressful. I like your system and i helped me a lot. I have one question (more might come later), What do you mean by " journal club with my supervisor."

This piece is really really helpful! I started from this one and went through the rest blog writings. I agree on many points with Daisy. I had an unhappy experience of PhD two years ago and now just started a new one in another country. I will take it as an adventure and enjoy it.

This is an AMAZING template. I've found this so helpful for my own workflow. Thank you so much!

I found this post really helpful. Thank you.

thank you very much!

Hi! Thank you very much for posting this guide and sharing your notion template! I do have a question—do you manually enter the references into Notion, or is there any way to speed up the process? Ta x

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Where can I find literature search?

You can access Mendeley’s literature search when landing on Mendeley.com or via the direct link here .

If you are using the desktop version of Mendeley Reference Manager, you can access literature search by opening the 'Tools' menu on the desktop toolbar and selecting the 'Search for articles online' option.

What are the advantages of searching Mendeley Catalog on Mendeley.com rather than via the Literature Search option that was previously available in Mendeley Desktop?

• Search results show what is already in your Library.
• Add new references to your library with one click.
• Open Access articles are clearly labelled.
• Citations and Mendeley Reader count clearly displayed on the search results page.
• 3 sort options: most relevant; most recent; most cited.
• Restrict search to Open Access articles only.
• Filter results by: year; document type; journal; author.
• Find Related content from the search results page.
• View PDF from the search results page.

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Mendeley Blog

Quicker literature reviews with the mendeley desktop 1.11 preview.

Today we’re announcing a preview of the next release of Mendeley Desktop, which adds an experimental feature to help you explore papers and find relevant information in them more quickly. This improved reading experience is initially available for Open Access papers, but we’re hoping to expand it to additional content in future.

Table of Contents

We automatically analyze the hierarchical structure of papers, identify the main headings and present them in the ‘ Contents ‘ tab. From the ‘My Library’ tab, you can browse supported papers and jump directly to the section of the document you are interested in.

We attempt to identify tables and figures that appear in the paper and list them in the ‘ Summary ‘ tab. You can  then select a table or figure to jump directly to the relevant section of the paper.

Tables of Data

Tables in the paper are located, the data is extracted from them, and the results presented in a normalised style for easier reading. You can also export the data by clicking the drop-down arrow in the header for the table and selecting ‘ Copy as HTML ‘. From there you can paste the data into a spreadsheet such as Excel for quick analysis or visualization.

Getting the Preview

Initially, we’re making this feature available for papers in our catalog that have been identified as Open Access. To see examples of enrichments:

• Download the preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.11
• Go to the ‘Literature Search’ pane in Mendeley Desktop, click the magnifying glass icon in the search box and select ‘Open Access’ to limit your search to open access papers.
• Search for a topic that interests you
• Browse the results. When you select a paper, if we’ve automatically extracted an outline, tables and figures then they will appear in the ‘Contents’ and ‘Summary’ tabs in the right-hand pane.

This is a new and experimental feature which we’re making available for early feedback. We know that we have plenty of work to do to expand coverage to more papers and improve the recall and accuracy of extraction, especially for tables with more complex layouts.

The research that enabled this feature was developed as part of the EU-funded CODE project , with partners at the University of Passau and the Know-Center in Graz.

Would you like to help us make the lives of researchers easier? Interested in developing algorithms for data extraction, working with a library of the world’s research or creating beautiful apps for scientists? We’re looking for a data scientist to help us extract information from papers and engineers to help bring the fruits of their work to users on desktops , mobile devices and the web . If you’d like to be involved – please get in touch! For examples of the R&D work we’ve been doing internally and with univeristies, see the Mendeley profiles of Roman and Kris .

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25 thoughts on “ quicker literature reviews with the mendeley desktop 1.11 preview ”.

I probably won’t install the preview but I do have a question. Does this only work for papers selected whilst browsing a literature search?

The summary tab looks like it could be useful for when reading a pdf in my library so that I can look at figures and tables without having to move the focus of the pdf reader away from text that I am concentrating on. Also, a references tab would help in this regard.

At the moment, when reading a pdf in Mendeley, I typically also open a second instance in an external pdf reader just for navigating the figures and reference list whilst I use the Mendeley PDF reader for the main text and note-taking.

Thanks for the feedback. This works for papers in your library or groups that match entries marked as ‘Open Access’ in our catalog as well.

There isn’t an easy way to find such papers in your library at the moment, but several early users of the feature both internally and externally have requested it, so it is something I hope we’ll be able to add.

It is great to see, that Mendeley is developing. But I believe Mendeley is missing some basic features, that should be implemented before such advance features as presented in the current post. I am talking about reliable and simple to use annotations:

1) Pen tool for annotations on tablets, phones, and desktop. 2) Print with annotations without exporting to the separate location. 3) Recognize the annotations made with external PDF reader (Acrobat) 4) Different color highlighting… and so on.

You get the idea, there are a lot of topics in the feedback section of the Mendeley on the annotations. That is what important for us, users, and that is what we need.

The features announced here are a nice addition, but the annotations are more important for everyday research work.

Thanks for the feedback. There is work going on under the hood concurrently with this project to improve annotation functionality in Mendeley Desktop and iOS.

I m often surprised that more people don t use Evernote, given it s free to sign up, syncs across multiple devices and has optical character recognition. If you re interested, there s some good advice out there for using it for academic work . By having all my reference material in databases I can do searches using keywords. The computer does all the heavy lifting and displays the relevant material in a list, which I can review to see if it meets my needs.

I totally agree with Maxim. I am astonished that the GUI and available tools did not evolve for almost 4 years. There are tones of basic features that are still missing (ranking papers, sorting papers by dates after a search, advance annotation features (use of colours), printing). From now on, Mendeley lag behind if I compare it to other similar softwares (e.g. Papers, Sente, Endnote or Citavi).

Very sad to continuously hear that there is work going on for more than 4 years and not to see any results.

What Maxim and Gaston says is very true. I really can’t understand why, on the one hand, Mendeley is developing such great features like importing directly from ScienceDirect, and on the other hand, does completely nothing with all the tips/suggestions/complaints found at Mendeley Support site (except for saying that you are “working on that”). Some of these suggestions are so important and basic at the same time! Skilled programer would need minutes to e.g. implement manual read/unread marking option, which now is unavailible and makes read/unread feature useless. And it’s been there for four years…

I agree with the comments above. It’s good to see new features on Mendeley. However, the software still lacks what lots of users, me included, perceive as basic features. Some of them have been requested for years in the “Mendeley Support” site. Such is the case of Mendeley inability to allow italics in the extracted metadata ( http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/145533-allow-italic-formatting-in-metadata ). I just came across this issue recently and had to manually add italics in tens of references that I used in a report. The link above is 5 years old. Cmon…

When will this be available? I am working on my dissertation and will be organizing a literature review in the coming weeks. I hope its available before I get started on the grunt work!!!

Future Doctor!

ok.. So i have it now… I am jsut figuring out how to work the contents tab

This is great … well done!

Will be even better when this is rolled out to all publications.

In my view Mendeley is the best reference tool out there.

Top of my list for improvements is quicker syncing for the iPad app.

Keep it up guys …

Agree with all the above! Please focus on the basic requests that most people have (annotations, GUI…) before adding new experimental functionality. I understand that it is probably less fun to code, but it is really needed now. I went to have a look at other software solutions recently because of that. thank you

@Bastien This is the result of a grant project that we had commitments to. We’re not ignoring core functionality and the next release should check off two of the top user requests, with more to follow.

What about thumbnails of the pages? Is that on the radar?

@Gustavo Not on our short term roadmap at the moment, but it’s something we’d like to see, as we bring the experiences on mobile/desktop closer in terms of consistency.

Any advances on the thumbnails? It’s driving me crazy that I can’t quickly scroll through pdfs

Totally agree with Maxim. There are many bugs in Mendeley which we keep on reporting and always get the reply that you are working on it. When an update is released the norm is to address all these bugs and incorporate most of the highly requested features. Because of what Maxim reported and a no. of other bugs like problem over watched folder, importing errors etc, I stopped using Mendeley for a few months and was glad to see the update. But alas, not one of these issues were addressed !!! Well its nice that Mendeley is working on some fancy stuff but if your basics are not right, people will be forced to look for other options.

While time boxing techniques like the pomodoro technique can help you focus on your writing tasks, I don t think they are really a cure for perfectionism. Instead, try using the Manchester academic phrase bank . This cool web page contains a vast store of ready made academic sentences sorted into categories of academic work, such as reviewing the literature or discussing results .

Hello Deepu,

Did you report the issues via emails to [email protected] or on the forum at support.mendeley.com . If you posted the issues on the support forum at support.mendeley.com and can dig up the links I may be update you on the current status of these issues.

Hi Rob, I have already reported these issues. Please find an email correspondence dated in mid of Nov. last year.

NOV 18, 2013 | 02:45PM GMT Josh replied: Thank you for taking the time to let us know about this issue. This is a known bug in Mendeley at present, and one that we are working on resolving as soon as possible. In the meantime, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause you. The current workaround for this issue is to create a symlink to your networked location on your current partition. Regards,

Rate the quality of our support! Please leave us feedback at http://mnd.ly/support_feedback NOV 16, 2013 | 01:09AM GMT Original message deepu wrote:

I have partitioned my hard disk and unfortunately the folder I would like to synchronize (watch folder) is not on the root folder /Users.. rather on /Volumes/… There is no option to select the folder in Mendeley as only the folders in root are displayed. There is no option to ‘view in finder’ too. Is there any work around This message was sent to …..@…. in reference to Case #: 48771.

HI, In my case, the table of contents was very important. It works well, but has a problem. When there is more than one file, the table of contents only detects the first one, even if the other files also have a table of contents that can be seen externally in Adobe Reader. thank you.

Re. ‘View in Finder’, right click on a PDF and select ‘Open Containing Folder’. This should open Finder and select the PDF.

Re. watching folders that are under /Volumes rather than /Users. Thanks for the reminder. The internal issue number is MD-17072 – the issue is that /Volumes is a hidden folder so doesn’t show up under ‘Watched Folders’ normal list on Mac.

We’re a group of volunteers and starting a new scheme in our community. Your web site provided uus with valuable info to work on. You’ve done a formidable job and our whole community will be gratful to you.

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3 tips on preparing a literature review

July 3, 2019

By Ian Evans

Here’s how you can hone your search techniques and organize your research, says an informationist at the University of Michigan Library

Carol Shannon is an Informationist at the University of Michigan Library and one of the first Mendeley Advisors. (Photo by Ian Evans) An MA in art history may not be the most common starting point for an informationist who works closely with clinical departments at a university, including gastroenterology, neuroscience and neurology. For  Carol Shannon   opens in new tab/window , Informationist at the  University of Michigan Library   opens in new tab/window , it taught her the value of finding a fresh perspective. That, she says, is always a valuable thing to bring to the process of learning and teaching. Here, she shares her thoughts on the best ways to navigate the huge amount of content available to students and researchers, and how tools like   can make a difference.

“When I was an art historian, I focussed on Eastern art, which is quite different to Western art,” she said. “You tend to see a lot of replication of other people’s work. That can look like copying from the Western perspective, but from the perspective of Eastern art, it’s about paying respect and commentating on what’s gone before. If you’re not able to break away from an entrenched way of thinking, you can miss that.”

Carol applies that fresh perspective at the University of Michigan, where she teaches information and search techniques to students in clinical departments. Her aim is to use active learning techniques to help students develop search skills that resemble real-world situations.

“Rather than having someone stand at the front of the class and lecture, active learning is based around small groups of students working together on a problem,” Carol explained. “It’s a much more fun approach and turns students into active participants in the learning process. So as part of a bigger project at the university, designed to revamp our approach to learning, I designed a game that would help students evolve their understanding of search.”

At the start of the process, students take a pre-test, including an assessment of their own knowledge. “You tend to find that students vastly overestimate their knowledge of how to search a database like PubMed – but that’s a useful thing for them to discover,” Carol said. From there, the students take five classes, each with a specific learning objective:

"Each class has a particular learning point, so students get used to working in ways that reflect real life. They have a problem to work on – sometimes complex – and they find that they have a lot of information from which they then have to pick out what’s important. At the end, we’re using quizzes again to test retention. "

Now, Carol is preparing a research paper on her findings — following her own advice in the process: "At the moment, I’m pulling all the data together and analyzing it. I used  Mendeley  for that, so I could keep all my citations in line when I was gathering them, as I did a literature review ahead of time. I would gather information and organize it in ways that were useful, in folders and with tags, so I would know what was about  flipped learning,   opens in new tab/window  what was about different kinds of active learning, and so forth. Mendeley makes those kinds of things very easy. " Carol was one of the first  Mendeley Advisors   opens in new tab/window . Mendeley Advisors are a group of 5,000+ Mendeley lovers in 130 countries, who help us to get the word out about the benefits of good reference and research workflow management. Learn more about the Mendeley Advisors  here   opens in new tab/window , including how to become one.

Here are her tips on search and preparation for a literature review:

1. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.

“When it comes to figuring out what to read, the approach you take will depend on what the project is. We ask students to come in with maybe three to four questions, and if they’re going to get good search results, those questions need to be focused. You need to have a clear idea of what your research statement or problem is; you can’t just have a vague concept – you will lose a lot of time. I’ve had students come in with searches where the initial statements have been a little careless. You send through the search results and they say, ‘Oh, well really the question is this. …’ If you’d known that up front, you would have saved a lot of time.”

2.  It doesn’t matter how you organize, but you must be organized.

“Actually ‘not organizing’ tends to be how most students start off! One of the things I talk about is how difficult life will be if you don’t organize in some way. I had a friend who got through a doctoral program by photocopying articles and highlighting them, and through this mad sorting process, the paper would kind of emerge.

“But bad things can happen to a good paper if you don’t organize your information. Elsevier’s Mendeley gives people a lot of options for that. You can use folders, you can have your library entirely organized by tags, which tells you what you thought was important. It’s very customizable. You need to find your own way, but you need to organize your information and your paper.”

3. Know your search strategy.

“When you’re doing an in-depth review of the literature, you need to think about your search strategy. One thing you can do is think out loud when you’re putting your search together so you’re aware of the logic of it, where you’ve used ‘and’ or ‘or,’ or other operators. Even though a database assumes ‘and,’ I sometimes recommend that people include it because it makes the logic of their search clear.

“You also need to think about how focused a search needs to be. If it’s vague – as I said – you’ll maybe end up with 10 million results, or 10,000 results that aren’t the right thing. If you’re too precise, you might not find anything. Some platforms, like  ScienceDirect , will have a taxonomy that helps identify articles with similar concepts but different wordings. In other instances, you might want to use synonyms to broaden your base. Even if you have a really specific idea of what you’re looking for – like the effect of a specific nutrient on a specific cell to treat a specific disease, you will want to do a lot of searches to make sure you’re not missing anything.”

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Systematic Reviews: Mendeley

• Record Keeping
• Developing Searches
• Deduplication
• Screening Sources
• Registration
• Data Extraction
• Useful Links
• Compiled Resources

Primary User Base

The primary users of Mendeley are professionals who have been published, lecturers in various scientific fields, researchers, librarians, and students.

Upload and Annotate

Mendeley users can upload articles from databases as well as online sources (with the use of a bookmark add-on). Yet, there are limitations to what popular sites Mendeley can upload from. It will only upload articles from supported sites. Users can also drag and drop PDFs into the citation manager. Once in Mendeley, articles can be annotated and highlighted.

Word Processor Integration

Mendeley offers a citation plug-in for Microsoft Word, LibreOffice and BibTex for the ability to cite while writing.

Installation Required?

Desktop installation is not required, but is available for Windows (7, 8.1, 10), macOS and Linux. Mendeley can be used in a browser and there are add-ons to help import articles from supported websites. There is a free mobile app for both android and apple devices. ( https://www.mendeley.com/download-desktop/ )

Collaboration Features

All Mendeley users can create groups and collaborate on research. Each plan (including the free plan) allows users to create 1 private/invite-only group with three members and up to 100 MB shared space (around 30-40 articles). Additional group plans are available for groups if more space or members are needed. ( https://guides.library.pdx.edu/c.php?g=474937&p=3249935 )

Price to Students

There are four versions of Mendeley. There is a free option available with upgrades that provide additional storage space. The free version gives users 2 GB of cloud storage. The Plus plan is recommended for students; it costs $4.99/month and allows up to 5 GB of personal library space. The Pro plan, Mendeley’s most popular plan, costs $9.99 a month and provides more storage (10 GB personal space). Unlimited storage space is available for those with the Max plan, which costs $14.99 a month. (https://www.mendeley.com/settings/upgrade/)

Access After Graduation?

Mendeley is a citation manager open for public use. So, as long as payments continue being made, Mendeley can be used. 

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Using mendeley desktop for systematic reviews.

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Mendeley would not usually be considered as the best choice of software for a full systematic review. Especially if your review involves downloading a large number of references, or you are planning on publishing your review, we would recommend using EndNote software for your review instead of Mendeley. It is much more transparent about which items are identified as duplicates and has much greater flexibility relating to checking and  removing duplicates . This is likely to significantly reduce the risk of accidentally removing items that are not duplicates and is more thorough when working with large sets of references.

Mendeley is only suitable for systematic reviews if you have the desktop version already downloaded, as the replacement, Mendeley Reference Manager offers only a very limited deduplication option. Mendeley Desktop is no longer available to download for new users and will only be available on UCL computers or on your own device using  Desktop@UCL Anywhere  for a limited time. 

Make sure you are aware of the reporting requirements for the methodology of your review and check that Mendeley will be suitable for providing the data  required for that before you start using Mendeley for your review. 

Below is detailed a step by step process for using Mendeley for your review.

Backing up your Mendeley library

Adding references to your library.

• Removing duplicates

Screening references

It's recommended to keep backing up your Mendeley desktop library as you add new sets of references by syncing it with the online version of Mendeley. 

• Synchronising web and desktop

For each source you search, create a folder in Mendeley where you will add these references to your library.

Export the references from each source in turn to the appropriate folder in your Mendeley library.

• Exporting references to Mendeley desktop

Make sure you record the number of references exported from each database before you import the references into Mendeley, as when you add references to your library it will start removing references it recognises as duplicate references. In practice this means while you might export 50 references from a database, there may only be 45 appearing in the folder if some are duplicates. 

It can also be useful to  tag  all references in the folders with the name of the database or other source so you can tell which database the reference was originally downloaded from. To do this, highlight all items in the folder and edit the reference that is open in the right hand pane by adding the name of the database or other source to the tag field, e.g. Medline. This will update all of the tag fields in references in that folder. 

Once you've added your references to your Mendeley library from all your sources, drag all the records from each of the individual folders into another new folder, from which you will remove duplicates. Mendeley may recognise and remove additional duplicates at this stage, so you may find the number of records in this folder does not total the number in your individual folders.

Now use Mendeley's  duplicate checking tool to find the remaining possible duplicates. Click on the folder that includes all your references for your review to do this.

Make sure that you check the duplicates thoroughly by clicking to expand the reference sets before merging them. After you have merged all the duplicates, it is recommended to do a final manual check for duplicates on the folder containing all your references, by clicking on the title column of the central pane to order them alphabetically.

If you're working with multiple reviewers to screen your references and want to use a reference management software to do so, we recommended using EndNote, following the methodology linked on our EndNote guide.

If you are planning to use reference screening software such as Rayaan or Covidence, however, it is possible to export your references from Mendeley as a RIS file, though please note this will export all references in your Mendeley library. The same methodology can be followed as for the instructions on our EndNote guide. It is also recommended to deduplicate references in Mendeley before transferring them to a screening software.

• Exporting your Mendeley library as a RIS file
• Exporting your library to screening software The same instructions for EndNote can be followed once you have exported your library as a RIS file.
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Knowledge management in the classroom using Mendeley technology

Mari aurora favero reis.

a Universidade do Contestado, Concórdia, SC 89711-330, Brazil

Jacir Favretto

Neide maria favretto, liani maria hanauer favretto, renato p. dos santos.

b Universidade Luterana do Brasil, Canoas, RS 92425-350, Brazil

Research in higher education institutions is present in all courses, and academic instruction in research methodology is vital, with educational technologies being an essential component of this process. With the Covid-19 pandemic, there were changes in teaching, learning, and in performing scientific research in undergraduate courses. Among the technologies, the Mendeley reference management tool has become increasingly helpful in these contexts. Therefore, this manuscript is an account of workshop experiences for the use of the Mendeley tool in the teaching of Research Methodology and Scientific Methodology offered in the distance education modality in undergraduate courses at the Universidade do Contestado, Brazil. After basic instruction on Mendeley, students participating in the workshops were guided to apply the tool using Bardin's content analysis technique. This technique is usually laborious and seldom involved in literature reviews by undergraduate students; Mendeley technology makes it more accessible. From experiences with the 2020 and 2021 workshops, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is suggested that the content analysis method combined with the Mendeley technology can help students present better literature reviews, especially for final graduation projects such as course completion monographs.

Introduction

The Scientific Methodology class in higher education institutions typically guides students to produce scientific articles and end-of-course monographs. A common difficulty student often have is citing and organizing the references according to the required standards. Another difficulty is finding and organizing a library for use in textual production. In both cases, the use of a reference management tool, such as Mendeley, can help students deal with their scientific productions. Researchers and students who use reference management tools to organize their work can save time for reading and writing ( Gunn, 2014 ).

Mendeley was created in 2008 by three German students, Paul Foeckler, Victor Henning, and Jan Reichelt, who were inspired by the principles of what was, at the time, the world's largest social music service “Last.fm”; they took concepts gleaned from this service and applied them to research ( Henning & Reichelt, 2008 ). Their goal was to create an open and interdisciplinary database with usage-based reputation metrics and collaborative filtering. Barbara Brynko (2013) reports that the acquisition of Mendeley in April 2013 represented a significant economic, social, and scientific change for scientific publishing company Elsevier (2013) , involving figures and evolution in the research industry.

Mendeley technology provides authors and readers with the tools Mendeley Desktop, a discontinued iOS or Android mobile version, and Mendeley Web system, all synchronized with the cloud, and a plugin that can be installed in MS Word or Libre Office systems ( Hadiningrat, 2020 ). It offers a functional, easy-to-use PDF reader with resources to highlight important sections of text and make annotations so that changes are saved to the cloud when the device is online ( Shin, 2016 ). Alternatively, when used as a social network, Mendeley technology helped share publications and increase citations, making it possible to discover job trends in a particular area of interest. The user could also contribute to the dissemination of scientific references, for greater opportunities to access scientific knowledge ( Yamakawa, Kubota, Beuren, Scalvenzi, & Miguel, 2014 ).

Web 2.0 fostered changes when listening to music, looking for jobs, communicating on social networks and locating or sharing knowledge, which also enabled significant advances in the medical and academic fields ( Zaugg, West, Tateishi, & Randall, 2011 ). In this sense, Mendeley technology has provided benefits to academic research, such as finding information, identifying partnerships for possible collaboration, disseminating the research itself, and developing a clearer understanding of which studies have had the most significant impact in a given field.

This type of technology promoted radical, rapid, and profound changes in science itself. It allowed the acquisition, manipulation, and storage of large amounts of data to facilitate the research process ( Fausto et al., 2012 ). With university students, it is possible to use Mendeley technology as a library that can be accessed on a desktop, laptop, or even a tablet ( Gunn, 2014 ). Studies show that these procedures can facilitate access to scientific material, citations, and even integration between the different subject areas of the researchers in the quotations ( Thelwall, 2018 ).

As for reading incentives, a survey of 860 Mendeley users shows that 55% of Mendeley's library users have read or intended to read at least half of the publications added to their library ( Mohammadi, Thelwall, & Kousha, 2016 ). The fact that authors and editors increasingly seek to publish scientific literature in digital format reduces printing costs and enables digital tools. A sample of publications taken at random from the Web of Science confirms that readers appear to share similar shapes across fields and can scale to a standard and universal form ( D’Angelo & Di Russo, 2019 ).

In this context, the DOI Digital Object Identifier system operated by CrossRef that allows editors to assign unique identifiers to articles and collect standardized metadata from retrieving identifiers from bibliographic data ( Pentz, 2001 ) – makes it easier to share academic, professional, and governmental publications, such as journal articles, research reports, data sets, and official publications ( Santos, 2020 ). Furthermore, it speeds up registration in the Mendeley library ( Thelwall, 2018 ) and helps to avoid problems with ethical issues, ensuring the integrity of scientific publications and copyright to researchers ( Pithan & Oliveira, 2013 ).

Undergraduates, masters' level, doctoral students, professors, librarians, and other researchers around the world use the Mendeley platform, making it part of modern culture, quality education and obtaining lifelong learning skills. ( Nagherneac & Magher, 2017 ). After the COVID-19 pandemic period, digital tools became a fundamental resource for education, as people started to carry out their activities in the home environment ( Berry, 2020 ; Zenkteler, Darchen, Mateo-Babiano, & Baffour, 2019 ). In university and graduate education, research activities previously carried out in laboratories, clinics, or in the field, in many situations switched to digital technology as the only possible way to continue research ( Joye, Moreira, & Rocha, 2020 ; Mohammadi et al., 2016 ; Nuere & de Miguel, 2020 ).

Online workshops can help students and teachers improve their skills in using Microsoft Word and Mendeley software resources in compiling final graduation projects ( Husadha et al., 2021 ; Restianingsih, Deswardani, & Pebralia, 2020 ). At our university, the teaching of Scientific Methodology was carried out using Mendeley technology in research, in a workshop format, initially to assist students in the development of their research project for the course completion monograph. In a second stage, we added Bardin's content analysis technique (1977) to produce literature reviews. In the coming years, analysis of the results of the workshops in Methodology classes may be carried out, based on the work presented. The purpose of this column is to provide an account of workshop experiences for the use of the Mendeley tool as used in the disciplines of Scientific Methodology and Research Methodology offered in the distance modality for undergraduate students at the Universidade do Contestado.

Mendeley in the discipline of methodology at the undergraduate level

Workshop-format activities on the use of Mendeley technology were developed for the Scientific Methodology classes, taught in the first semester, and Research Methodology, taught in the final semester, prior to the course conclusion work for different undergraduate courses, taught online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The workshops were held in three separate months on Google Meet: in July with medical students, in August with law students and in September with students from other undergraduate areas (Administration, Engineering, Accounting Sciences, Education, etc.). All lectures were held in the Virtual Learning Environment used in Distance Education classes. The workshops had students who participated online and others who performed the activity by accessing the workshop recording available on YouTube.

The lectures began with a brief presentation of Mendeley's technology and its relevance to scientific research. The instructor then taught the students to access the Mendeley Software website, register, download and install the program. After installation, one of the participants shared the screen with the room, and the instructor guided the system configuration, installing the text editor plugin, the Brazilian technical standard (ABNT), and creating a link to a folder labeled “library”. After configuring the computers, students were instructed to search the Google Scholar or the EBSCOhost database for publications in their research project area. One of the students would share their screen again, and the instructor would guide them through using the personal library, preferably through the search address (DOI).

After accessing the methodology manual, which is available on the research page of the university's website, students accessed the research project template and methodology guide to produce their research project or article. When editing the text, the use of Mendeley facilitates citation and reference, essential elements in any type of scientific writing. The students were responsible for relating written material to the source of information and locating citations ( Sau & Bhakta, 2018 ).

Before the intervention through these workshops, students spent significant time learning the particulars of each type of reference. There were also other problems, such as non-compliance with the standard, absence of references, or presence of references not mentioned in the text. However, the use of the software alleviates these problems and give the student more time for textual production and analysis of relevant literature on the subject. Knowledge outcomes from the workshops were evidenced by students' expression of thanks sent through the virtual learning environment, via email, or similar sentiments expressed by the teachers of the courses. Metrics also demonstrated there were a significant number of students accessing the recordings available on YouTube, showing that students revisited the information after the workshop.

Overall, the Mendeley program allows for quote management, online support, sharing quotes with others, and using social media-like features ( Trout, 2014 ), and can also help with quote counting and tracking ( Zahedi & Haustein, 2018 ). The advent of digital technologies has made it possible to track the diffusion of many forms of new knowledge, allowing for a new stream of analysis and its own related literature ( D’Angelo & Di Russo, 2019 ).

The use of Mendeley in content analysis, according to Bardin, in bibliographic research

After the organization of the personal library, the students were guided to produce bibliographic research based on the analysis of documents, according to the steps proposed by Bardin (1977) : (i) pre-analysis; (ii) exploration of the material; (iii) treatment of results, inference and interpretation. The pre-analysis phase occurs with “floating reading” of the publications added to the Mendeley library, where the first contact is made with the texts that will compose the research library's favorite documents ( Fig. 1 ).

Library to produce these articles about Mendeley.

When organizing the critical criteria for the initial classification, it is crucial to note the frequency of occurrence of the primary criterion. For example, when one assigns the term “Mendeley” in the search ( Fig. 2 ), the system notes 100 hits found. Articles of little relevance are usually discarded. In this phase, the researcher establishes the indicators, which result in categories (or criteria) and subcategories (secondary classification).

Frequency of occurrence for the keyword Mendeley in the highlighted text.

The administration of bibliographies and decision-making in the systematic review of the literature is a long and tedious phase ( Bardin, 1977 ), especially when done manually. With Mendeley, this can be done as follows: The categories and/or subcategories and a previously configured spreadsheet can be highlighted when accessing the texts added in the favorites folder. For example, in the content analysis for research on Mendeley, considering the word “Citation” and the subcategory “research” as the main category, when selecting texts, it is possible to establish search results in the articles from the library. And, in the last stage – treatment of results, inference, and interpretation - technology can contribute to significant results in systematic or integrative literature reviews. The raw data can be processed in Microsoft Excel to give meaning to the research, using statistics, meanings, figures, graphs, or other possibilities for presenting the results. In Excel, the researcher can use the function “classify and filter” ( Fig. 3 ), classify the variables, and relate the categories to the results of the works analyzed.

Data for content analysis using a spreadsheet for the theme “Meditation” in a systematic literature review.

In the previous figure ( Fig. 3 ), a Psychology student relates meditation techniques to other aspects of research using the content analysis feature of Mendeley technology, as demonstrated in the workshop. Other students also highlighted the importance of the methodology used in class in their research, enabling future publications and different areas and research themes. Qualitative research originating in the Humanities can be adapted to the unique realities in the health fields, and content analysis can be used to interpret the data ( Hajinejad, Ebrahimi, de Jong, & Ravanipour, 2019 ; Wisur-Hokkanen, Glasberg, Mäkelä, & Fagerström, 2015 ). Moreover, content analysis has been one of the main techniques in analyzing audio transcriptions in qualitative research ( McKenzie et al., 2017 ). In business, content analysis is used in organizational studies and in the hotel industry ( Yu, 2020 ), which has evolved due to concern with the scientific rigor it has shown ( Mozzato & Grzybovski, 2011 ).

As for the combination of the content analysis technique with Mendeley's technology, practical experience has shown that it can help students to present better-structured reviews in the preparation of their research projects for undergraduate monographs. In the workshops, other possibilities for using this methodology were considered: in the law course, students pointed out the possibility of using Mendeley technology in content analysis for the analysis of civil laws and proceedings; in the medical course there was a discussion about using Mendeley's library to organize folders with medical records. Therefore, Mendeley's technology explored in the workshop made the work more attractive for students from different subject areas, who explored further opportunities for the application of the content analysis method in the teaching of Scientific Methodology and Research Methodology.

Final considerations

In this manuscript, the methodological approach presents two possibilities for using Mendeley technology in higher education: the first, experience-based usage for Research Methodology, where it is demonstrated that it is possible to train students through non-classroom pedagogical lectures. The second is the possibility of using Mendeley technology to analyze content in the production of bibliographic research, ensuring agility and quality of scientific output.

The results of both experimental workshops showed gains for the courses involved and for the institution where the activities were carried out. These results are anecdotal, as there is, so far, no concrete data that assesses the effectiveness of the methodology applied to undergraduate students. However, changes were observed in how undergraduate students researched, as presented in the Psychology course. Therefore, both in face-to-face and distance education, there is evidence for the importance of software in assisting students in writing their graduation course conclusion papers. Once the students who had access to this methodology present their course completion papers, it will be possible to better assess how they took advantage of the training. In addition, based on their presented works, a comparative survey of their research with the research of previous students can be carried out.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Mari Aurora Favero Reis : Writing, preparation of the original manuscript.

Renato P. dos Santos: Conceptualization, knowledge of the software, supervision.

Jacir Favretto and Liani Favretto: Data Collection, Review and Editing.

Neide Maria Favretto : Course supervision, data collection.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Mendeley To Notion: Tractable Lit Review (II)

Ever wondered how to stay on top of scientific literature? Meet MendeleyToNotion , a Python-based, fully open-source package, that allows you to automatically keep track of your literature review collected on Mendeley in Notion via their APIs.

Description

This project allows you to export newly added or recently updated documents in Mendeley to your Notion database via the APIs provided by the two. If you’d like the export to happen as soon as you make a change in Mendeley, then you can run the script scripts/runMendToNotion.sh peridocially at a reasonable frequency via a crontab job.

GitHub Repository

You can find the all the assosciated code for MendeleyToNotion in this github repository

Update : This hasn’t been tested out after Mendeley’s Sept 1, 2022 changes. It is not clear how long the API will remain available for easy access to Mendeley data.

Mendeley Setup

Interfacing with notion, running the script, requirements.

You can install all the requirements using the following command:

Directory Structure

Note : I wanted to make use of the mendeley python sdk directly, but their auth code has issues with the refresh method. Instead, I have cloned the mendeley project and made changes to it locally, most notably in the MendeleyAuthorizationCodeTokenRefresher class in mendeley/auth.py

Share this:

If you use this in your work and want to adapt this code, please consider starring the github repo or forking from it.

You can cite it as:

Cardiometabolic factors related to post-COVID-19 conditions: a scoping review

Description.

The study aims to map, through a scoping review, the scientific evidence related to cardiometabolic factors in post-Covid-19 conditions.

Steps to reproduce

A scoping review was carried out with the guiding question: What are the cardiometabolic implications present in patients with post-COVID-19 syndrome? The information sources used were Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS); Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE) via EBSCO Information Services; Web of Science (WoS), Embase via Elsevier; EBSCO and SCOPUS via CAPES journal portal. For gray literature, the CAPES theses and dissertations catalog, Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), Who Library Database and the medRxiv and OpenGrey repositories were used. A model adapted according to the JBI was used to select the evidence. The results obtained from the search were exported to the Rayyan reference manager developed by the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), the studies were selected independently by two researchers, and the data obtained were presented using PRISMA and mapped in the form of tables and figures.

The systematic literature review process: a simple guide for public health and allied health students

• et al. See more

A literature review is a key part of all academic research that informs researchers of the existing body of knowledge. Reviews conducted systematically are becoming more appealing to the researcher about two reasons. Firstly, they are robust, strong, comprehensive and reproducible and can appropriately serve the background review of any primary research. Secondly, they are qualified to be a stand-alone piece of academic work that contributes to the scientific body of knowledge. Although researchers and students in higher education who wish to write their dissertations are informed about the need for generating a literature review for primary research, when it comes to conducting a full systematic review, they may have some confusion and doubt on the distinction between a traditional literature review and a systematic review. This paper aims to clarify what a systematic review entails and take the readers' attention through the practical steps in conducting a systematic review. So, more of a practical step-by-step guide, rather than theoretical discussion of content, has been included. This paper would benefit early-career researchers, undergraduate students and many post-graduate students who wish to write their papers or dissertations based on a systematic review.

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CITATION STYLE

Kabir, R., Hayhoe, R., Bai, A. C. M., Vinnakota, D., Sivasubramanian, M., Afework, S., … Parsa, A. D. (2023). The systematic literature review process: a simple guide for public health and allied health students. International Journal of Research in Medical Sciences , 11 (9), 3498–3506. https://doi.org/10.18203/2320-6012.ijrms20232496

Readers' Seniority

Lecturer / Post doc 5

Professor / Associate Prof. 3

Researcher 3

PhD / Post grad / Masters / Doc 1

Readers' Discipline

Nursing and Health Professions 4

Medicine and Dentistry 3

Business, Management and Accounting 2

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