profile

The Effortless Academic

Google's Top Tool For Academic Lit Reviews: NotebookLM

Published 17 days ago • 1 min read

Google's AI tool for Academics and Students

Dear Scholar,

NotebookLM is a tool developed by Google and released about a year ago. It can process up to 300 PDFs and create mind maps, records, flashcards, quizzes, and even videos of your content. Ever since it was released in 2024, it has become one of my favourite tools for a literature review.

In recent months, I have implemented major updates that I would like to dedicate this week's newsletter to. As a reader of this newsletter, you may know that I have a weakness for mind maps, which NotebookLM readily generates.

In this article, I explore audio and video overviews, mind maps, and reports. The article features a video on the mindmap feature. Selecting a sub-topic in the mind map generates an AI synthesis on that sub-topic and includes references that point directly to specific passages in the PDF.

Additionally, I provide five very useful prompts to elevate every literature review.

​

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

​

Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

This is the weekly Effortless Academic Newsletter. It consists of an in-depth tutorial and additional events, promotions, or relevant information for the AI-curious modern academic. I strive to consistently provide value with every email. If this is not relevant to you, you can always unsubscribe from everything and will never hear from me again. If you find the email somehow inappropriate, please reply to me and let me know what you didn't like.

The Effortless Academic

Literature Review Tools, Note-Taking Strategies and AI tutorials for the modern academic. Publish more with less effort and supercharge your career.

Read more from The Effortless Academic

In-Depth Review of Liner: AI Agents for Every Part of the Academic Workflow Dear Scholar, AI agents are quickly evolving to become the next frontier in AI, as they can solve far more complex use cases than a simple large language model alone, even when supplemented with an academic database. (Check out the infographic below). This week, I am testing Liner, a tool that has been around for many years but just recently switched its focus to academic AI. Currently, Liner offers five AI agents for...

25 days ago • 1 min read

AI Literature Review Workflow in 2025 Dear Scholar, When I published my literature review workflow diagram, it garnered positive and negative reactions. Surprisingly, a lot of academics reject the idea that AI should be used in literature reviews because we as scientists will not be able to maintain our creativity or learn much. Here are some reactions: All of these criticisms come from senior academics with years of experience. For instance, the professor on the top left rejects AI-written...

about 1 month ago • 3 min read

Academic Writing Apps Comparison Dear Scholar, In this week’s article, I want to compare three tools for academic writing: PaperPal, which is made for academics, ChatGPT, a general-purpose tool and Grammarly, which is optimised for grammar. It turns out there is no best tool out there. The question is, rather, when should you use which tool? This article suggests using ChatGPT in the brainstorming and ideation phase of your writing due to its general purpose and customizability. Then move on...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read