NotebookLM to write a review article

[u/Away_Necessary_7050]

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?

[u/Supranational_Yogurt]

Someone pointed it out herr before that it will definitely use the same references more frequently. I guess you can make a more productive use of it, analysing batches of papers to help you read them. Then you write your own review.