Hi everyone! I'm new to academic research and just finished my first big literature review for my master's program. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but I think I finally landed on a workflow that really worked for me. I wanted to share it here to see if anyone has suggestions or does something similar.
I started by using ResearchRabbit to discover papers. I loved how it mapped out the "similar work" and let me visualize connections. It felt less like a blind search and more like following a trail. Once I had a big batch of potential papers, I exported that list and moved them into Rayyan for screening.
Rayyan was a game-changer for the abstract/title screening phase. Being able to quickly tag things as "include," "exclude," or "maybe" with my co-author was so smooth. The blinding feature and the conflict resolution made sure we were on the same page without influencing each other. After we finalized our list of included studies, I exported the citations and PDFs.
Finally, everything went into Zotero. I use it as my single source of truth for my reference library. I organized everything with collections and tags, attached the PDFs, and then used the Word plugin to write my paper and generate the bibliography. It felt like a clean, three-stage process: discovery (ResearchRabbit), screening (Rayyan), and management/writing (Zotero).
Does this make sense? I'm still learning, so I'd love to hear if I'm missing any tricks or if there's a better way to connect these tools. I did have to do a few manual exports and imports between steps, but it wasn't too bad.
Thanks!