A literature review, start to finish, in Mosaic

A literature review is a project with many moving parts: a question, a growing set of papers, notes on each of them, a plan, and a draft that has to cite all of it correctly. Here is how to run one in Mosaic, from an empty project to a cited draft. For the method itself, independent of any tool, see How to write a literature review.

1. Start a project for the review

Create a project in your workspace and name it after the review. Everything that follows lives inside it: the papers, your notes, the tasks and the drafts. If you work with a lab, create it in the lab workspace so your co-authors can join you later.

Before you collect anything, write the review question and its boundaries in the project description: the population or subject, the time period and the kinds of study you will include. It takes five minutes, and it gives you a test to apply to every paper that follows.

2. Gather the papers you already have

Most reviews start from papers you have already found. Bring them into the project library:

• Import collections from Zotero, or folders from Mendeley, and choose the items you want.
• Add single papers by DOI, PMID or link.
• Upload the PDFs you have saved.

Mosaic skips papers that are already in the project and looks for an open-access PDF for each new one. While you browse journal sites, the Chrome extension saves the paper you are reading to the project in one click.

3. Read and annotate

Open a paper in the reader to read its PDF next to its details. Highlight the passages that matter and keep notes as you go. Your highlights and notes stay with the paper in the project, so when you sit down to write, the evidence you marked is where you left it.

Tag papers as you read them, for example by method or by the part of the review they belong to. Tags make it easy to pull up every paper for one section later.

4. Keep up with new work

A review goes stale quickly. Each project has a daily briefing of new papers, found from the papers already in your library. Read the list each morning, add the papers that belong in the review straight to the library, and skip the rest. Over the weeks a review takes, the briefing keeps the library current without a separate search routine.

5. Ask the assistant across your library

The assistant has the whole project as context: your papers, documents, tasks and briefings. Ask it the questions a review raises. How did these studies measure the outcome? Which populations do they cover? Where do their findings disagree, and why might that be?

It answers with citations to the papers it used, and each citation opens its source, so you can read the passage before you rely on it. When the library has a gap, ask it to look further: it searches OpenAlex, PubMed and Semantic Scholar for papers you do not have yet, and the web when a question needs it.

6. Plan the work as tasks

Break the review into goals and tasks, such as screening, extracting data and drafting each section, with owners and due dates on the project timeline. Once you and the assistant agree on a plan, it can turn the plan into tasks for you, so the steps you talked through become a list you can work from.

7. Write and cite

Write the review where you already write: Google Docs or Word. The drafts are filed with the project, and the Mosaic add-in for each puts your project library in a panel beside the document. Search it, insert citations as you write, and let the add-in build the bibliography in the style you need, from APA and Vancouver to Chicago, IEEE or Nature.

8. Bring in your co-authors

Reviews are rarely solo work. Invite your co-authors and supervisor to the workspace, and they see the same library, highlights, notes and drafts that you do, so nobody works from an old reading list or an outdated PDF. Assign the screening and drafting tasks to the people doing them, with due dates, and the project timeline shows at a glance what is done and what is waiting.

When someone adds a paper, it lands in the shared library with its identifier, and the whole team can cite it from Google Docs or Word straight away. One library also means one version of each reference, which saves an afternoon of reconciling bibliographies before submission.

Before you submit

Read each claim against the passage it cites; the reader keeps every paper a click away. Check that every source in the bibliography is cited in the text and every citation appears in the bibliography, and that the whole document uses the one style your journal or department requires. If you need a refresher on the styles, APA vs MLA vs Chicago compares them. Then send the draft to your co-authors for a final read; they already have every source in the shared library.

Mosaic is in beta. To run your next review in it, join the waitlist, and see the integrations for the add-ins and the extension.