Procrastinated a 12-Page Literature Review Due Tomorrow. Help!

If you have a literature review due in a day, 2 days, or even a week, you'll want to get serious quickly on putting your papers together, extracting and annotating data, and writing around what you've pulled out. For the best results, you need to pull data from the entire paper, not just the abstracts.

To get started quickly:

1. 1Download a citation manager: I always recommend Zotero as it's free.
2. 2Download an extraction software: FoundThat works well with Zotero and is easy to learn.
3. 3Start pulling research articles from your university library or a publisher website.
4. 4Load them into the citation manager and extraction software.
5. 5Add extracted text and data to your Word/Google doc.
6. 6Start writing.

This can be done by hand as well for free, if you go paper-by-paper and copy/paste from each paper into a Word/Google doc, though in a pinch, speed is your friend. If you're looking for more detail on how to write a literature review from scratch, read "Give Me Your Lit Review Secrets".