A literature reviewpapers read, compared and synthesised into a chapter

Method

1. 1

   Have your assistant set up the shelf and the themes

   Connect your assistant to know.sh once, following the support page for Claude, ChatGPT or a local model. Then tell it your research question and the themes you expect: “Using know.sh, make a shelf called Green space and adolescent mental health, with this question as its line, and four documents on it: Measuring green space exposure, Pathways: activity, stress, social contact, Outcomes and instruments, Equity and deprivation. Give each a one-sentence overview.”

   Leave those overviews short. You will write the real ones last, once the papers are in.

2. 2

   Give it the papers, a theme at a time

   In Claude or ChatGPT, attach the PDFs for one theme, ten or so at a time, or paste their abstracts and DOIs from your reference manager. Ask for one Evidence finding per paper in that theme’s document, titled first author, year and what it is — “Okafor 2023: cohort, NDVI within 500 m and SDQ scores” — with the DOI as its source and four parts under bold labels: Methods, Sample, Findings, Limitations.

   Tell it to take numbers only from the paper, to mark anything it could not find as missing rather than guess, and to leave a last line, My reading, empty. Forty papers become forty findings in an evening. Each one is a draft.

3. 3

   Read each paper and fix its finding in the editor

   Now do the reading. With the paper open, press Edit on its finding and check every number, the design and the sample against the source. Rewrite the parts in your own words, add the limitations you noticed that the authors did not admit, and fill in My reading: what this paper means for your question.

   Change a finding’s type where it is really a Question, drag the findings into the order you will discuss them, and delete any the assistant filed in the wrong theme. If a phrase is worth quoting, put it in quotation marks with the page number. Revisions show which lines are still the assistant’s.

4. 4

   Ask your assistant for papers you have missed

   Once a theme has a dozen papers, ask your assistant to research a narrow question on the web and file what it finds as a new document on the shelf, one finding per paper with its source links: “Longitudinal studies since 2015 of residential green space and adolescent depressive symptoms, outside the UK and US.” This needs an assistant with web search; Claude and ChatGPT have it, and many local set-ups do not.

   Treat every entry as a lead. Open each one, check that the paper exists, that the authors, year and journal are right, and that it says what the summary claims. Language models invent plausible references, and a citation you have not opened does not go in the chapter.

5. 5

   Build the comparison tables

   Ask your assistant to read every finding in a theme and lay them side by side: author and year, design, sample size, country, exposure measure, outcome measure, direction of the association, and main limitation. Ask for the table as a new Insight finding at the end of the theme, each row naming the finding number it came from.

   Check the rows against your corrected findings; if a cell is wrong, fix it in the editor. The table is a working tool for you, not a figure for the chapter.

6. 6

   Mark what matters and what is missing

   Read each theme through. Mark the three or four papers your argument leans on as Key, and highlight the lines you expect to cite, so their numbers show bold in the index. Where the table shows a gap — no studies in rural areas, no measures of actual time spent outdoors — add a Question finding that says so. Those gaps are what a review chapter is for.

   Open the index. NDVI, SDQ and the cohorts you rely on should appear with the findings that use them. If an instrument is missing, it is only in the body; add it to the finding’s title or first line.

7. 7

   Write each overview yourself

   Now write the overview of each theme in the editor: what the studies agree on, where they disagree and why, how strong the evidence is, and what remains unknown. This is the synthesis, and it is yours. Write it with the tables open beside you, not with an assistant drafting it.

   Afterwards, ask your assistant to check it against the findings, a claim at a time; it can leave proposed notes, with Accept and Dismiss, and never touches your text. Revisions keep each version of the overview, so when your supervisor asks why the evidence on pathways now looks weaker than it did in March, the March version is there to compare.

8. 8

   Test yourself before the panel

   A week before the upgrade panel, ask your assistant for a quiz on each theme. It writes five to ten questions with know.sh’s quiz tools — which studies used distance to a park, which found no association in boys — each citing the finding it came from, and you take the quiz in know.sh or the iOS app (in TestFlight beta).

   The quiz comes back under Revisit in three, seven or twenty-one days depending on your score, which is about the rhythm of supervision meetings.