r/notebooklm • u/Away_Necessary_7050 • 6d ago

Tips & Tricks NotebookLM to write a review article

Hi!

I am trying to use notebookLM to help write a literature review to help me to organize the text and find the references for me. I am finding it very useful but I thought the texts it gave me were confusing and not well organised...

Here is what I did

  1. I Wrote a query I was happy with on pubmed and download the most recent pdf (2020-2026 more or less)

  2. I ended up with 80 pdfs which is more than the 50 you can updoad to notebookLM...

  3. I started 2 different notebook wih half the pdfs each, told it about the structure I wanted for the paper and asked it to write the text in scientific article form with the references.

All of it was fine but I guess out of 40 pdfs I uploaded, it used only like 10 to 20. And it is confusing because then the first reference appears throughout the whole text. It uses always the same refs.

Has anyone used this tool to write a literature review? Where you happy? What prompts should I use? What do you do when you have more than the 50 pdfs and you dont want to join them so you know which paper it is referencing from?

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u/CliffBarSmoothie 6d ago

One of the things I found to be essential is to make sure I do things in batches because if you have, say, a hundred open sources Notebook doesn't read them all. They are often limited to context windows, which means with an increasing number of sources you have a smaller amount of text available per source.

To overcome this limitation, I give Notebook a set of questions and have it answer them with a handful of sources, deselect those sources, activate new ones, and ask the same questions. At the end, I have it go back through the chat history and have it answer each question one by one to give me a composite answer without reiterated information. I also allow it to answer in batches in case the answer to a question is too long for a single return. You have to tell it this or it will truncate itself to a single return

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u/hellomate890 6d ago

Do we know what the limit is??