Research Resource Center
Research, made less painful.
After hundreds of interviews with researchers and graduate students, we compiled resources to make literature reviews easier at every step, whether you're starting a review, making sure you don't miss important papers, or trying to make the process more purposeful and clear. Use the menu on the left to browse or search, or start with the sections below.
Browse by topic
Find the part of the research process you're stuck on and jump straight to it.
Starting a Literature Review
Get moving from a blank page: how to begin, what tools to set up, and how to make real progress even on a deadline.
3 guides →Not Missing Important Papers
Search and screen with confidence so you don't overlook the key study, quote, figure, or table your review depends on.
3 guides →A Purposeful, Clear Process
Make your review intentional, reproducible, and rewarding, from finding the through-line to documenting your methods.
2 guides →How Can I Learn to Write Meta-Analyses?
The full meta-analysis workflow: search, screening, storage, extraction, and analysis, plus the tools that make each stage less painful.
The literature review workflow
A repeatable, six-step system for getting from a pile of PDFs to a written review.
Set up a reference manager
Download a citation manager so you're not learning citation format the day it's due. Zotero is free and works well.
Add a screening & extraction tool
Pair your reference manager with an extraction tool like FoundThat. It connects with Zotero and is quick to learn.
Gather your papers
Pull relevant articles from your university library or publisher websites. Collect anything promising based on the abstract.
Load everything into your tools
Get all your literature in one place so you're never asking "where'd I put that?" Load papers into both tools.
Pull key quotes, tables & data
Search the full text, pull the quotes and table data that matter, and compare variables across papers, not just abstracts.
Write around what you extracted
With the quotes and data in your doc, write about how they connect. Then polish with a tool like Grammarly.
Quick answers
The questions researchers ask us most, answered in a couple of paragraphs.
Start with your mindset. Before anything else, ask: what broader impact do I want from this research? What problem should be solved? What is something I can't yet do that I'd want to be able to do? Your answers guide the whole process.
Then break the paper into steps: (1) the big problem to solve, (2) what's already being done about it, (3) whether existing knowledge can solve it, (4) new knowledge to gain through experimentation, (5) applying both to solve the problem, and (6) testing that the problem is actually solved.
What researchers are asking
Real questions from researchers working through reviews and analyses. New guides tackling these are on the way.
Starting a review
- How do I start writing a literature review?
- I'm trying to write a lit review and have no idea where to start.
- Procrastinated a 12-page literature review due tomorrow: any tips?
- How should I go about doing a literature review efficiently?
- Writing my first literature review for my master's: any advice?
Not missing papers
- How can I more effectively find studies for my review?
- How do I quickly find papers similar to the ones I have?
- What is the easiest way to find trusted meta-analyses?
- How many papers do you read daily for a systematic review?
- How do I know I've covered the literature?
A clearer process
- How do you write a literature review without going crazy?
- Does anyone enjoy writing literature reviews? How?
- How do I best structure a literature review?
- What's your full literature review workflow?
- How do I make my review reproducible?
After extraction: analyze your data
Once you've pulled your data out, these outside guides walk through the analysis steps in R and beyond.
Meta-analysis in R
These are third-party resources we've found helpful; FoundThat isn't affiliated with them.
Spend less time buried in papers
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