Dear Reader,

Every so often, a topic comes up often enough in your replies that I know it is the next thing I have to make. Literature reviews were that topic, and I spent most of this week recording my second-ever real YouTube Video. It runs just under an hour, start to finish, with nothing left out.

I am also preparing a webinar with AI expert Avi Staiman on Nov 22nd. It's free, so I hope to see you there!

And lastly, EffortlessAcademic now offers certificates for course completion!

Let me know what you find useful and interesting,
Ilya

Video Tutorial: Literature Review with AI

First, thank you. My first YouTube video on note-taking I made two months ago went further than anything I have published before, and that is thanks to you watching it, sharing it, and telling me what you wanted next.

What most of you wanted next was the literature review. So here it is.

The premise is simple. AI is flooding every field with more papers than anyone can read, which is exactly why conventional lit review methods no longer work. Collecting everything and summarising every paper was fine when a field published a few hundred papers a year. Today, some conferences saw an 80-fold increase over 10 years. You simply can't read that much.

So we fight fire with fire. Instead of reading every paper, you chase the ideas inside them and let AI handle the discovery, filtering and parts of synthesis. I call it the detective mindset, and it genuinely was not possible before these tools existed.

The video walks through the full workflow:

1. Framing a research question that actually narrows your search
2. Finding the first paper worth reading
3. Exploring the reference network around it
4. Reading by question and taking topical notes
5. Tracking the clues as they accumulate
6. Closing the loop and knowing when you are done
7. Writing the whole thing up from your notes

Roughly 50 minutes, with timestamps if you want to jump to a specific step.

Upcoming Webinar with Avi Staiman from Academic Language Experts: Nov 22nd

I'm being interviewed by Avi Staiman about the digital information management system I've been building for the last five years: a personal "Wikipedia for my own research" in Obsidian, with hundreds of papers and more than 500,000 words of notes. As well as how I gave AI access to it over the last year and the massive productivity boost it brought.

Avi is the founder of Academic Language Experts, an editor at The Scholarly Kitchen, and has trained more than 30,000 researchers in how to use AI responsibly. He's going to press me on the practical questions: what it actually takes to set up, whether it's realistic for someone starting today, and where the researcher has to stay firmly in charge.

I'd rather be asked hard questions about this than present it uninterrupted, so come with your own.

👉 Free, and there will be time for questions. Recordings after the webinar on Nov 22nd.

Get a Certification for Course Completion

Many of you asked me for course completion certificates. We have no implemented this for the flagship information management course. To get a certificate, you need to:

1. Complete 95% of the course material
2. Pass the "Final Assessment" at the end of the course (75% or more)
3. Email or DM me from your account

Certificates include an ID, which allows them to be double-checked and makes them tamper-proof.

Want to leave Effortless Academic forever: Unsubscribe from everything. I am sorry to see you go, and farewell.