Literature Reviews using Zotero & Obsidian

Literature reviews are an integral part of academic research and writing; from getting up to speed on a topic to writing a dissertation. In this article, I set out how you can use Zotero and Obsidian to facilitate your literature review process. This is not a “literature review” how-to-guide and assumes you are familiar with the basics of conducting literature searches.

While this article uses literature reviews as the example, a similar process can be used for whenever you need to read and synthesize publications, such as preparing for a class, course, workshop or conference; creating a log for updating a syllabus; or a reference database on a specific topic.

Getting started

You will need to be familiar with An Updated Academic Workflow: Zotero and Obsidian, in particular section III. Literature Notes, which provides you with the setup instructions for using the plugin Zotero Integration to create literature notes. This process also relies on the plugin Dataview.

I. Collect and tag resources

The first step in this process is to decide on a tag for your task: whether for a dissertation, dissertation chapter, journal article, workshop, or project, come up with a unique tag. For example, #DataLitReview, #Ch2, #ClimateFluPaper, #SampleWorkshop.

Then, collect your resources by adding them into Zotoro. You can do this using the browser connectors or by manually adding them to your database. At this time, you can add your tag to the resource.

Using the browser connectors:

Adding tags manually (useful for literature already in your database too):

II. Read, annotate & take notes

Here’s where the actual work is: now you need to go through and read each paper, highlight passages you want to retrieve, and add your own notes. As you read each, you can create a literature note in Obsidian.

NB: If you’re unfamiliar with this process, see An Updated Academic Workflow: Zotero and Obsidian, in particular part III. Literature Notes.

Depending on your template, your literature notes will look a little like this:

Here, you can see the tag #DataLitReview has been pulled automatically from Zotero. In the green section, “synthesis”, I have manually added the primary contribution that the paper makes. You can change this to whatever you wish, provided you use the “::” at the end of the word. This signals to the Dataview plugin text that isn’t in the frontmatter/YAML/properties.

In addition to the literature note metadata, the annotations made on the PDF will all be pulled in also:

You may want to synthesize and process these notes a little. I use different color highlights to mean different things. Here yellow is something interesting, blue is the thesis/contention of the paper or decision, and green is for references I want to follow up further. I like to make this a bit clearer in my notes as a tidy them up, e.g.:

Repeat this process as you conduct your literature review for each publication.

III. Create your summary table

Now, we use Dataview to bring all the key information into a summary table. Dataview uses a fairly accessible language to structure queries.

```dataview
TABLE 
title as Title, 
itemType as Item, 
status as Status, 
dateread as Read, 
contribution as Contribution
WHERE contains(tags, "DataLitReview")
SORT status DESC, read DESC
```

Simply replace the red text with your relevant tag, in quotes. Here, you can also replace any of the headings with a property in your literature note (either from the frontmatter/properties/YAML or from in the text of the note, provided “::” is used to signal to Dataview).

This will output a table like this:

The table will automatically update, so if you add subsequent literature notes, or edit existing notes, it will be reflected in the table. With a large amount of literature, you can end up with a fairly comprehensive table.

If you use tags widely in Obsidian, you may want to limit the Dataview query to just your literature notes folder. To do so, you would simply add FROM and your folder in quotes:

```dataview
TABLE 
title as Title, 
itemType as Item, 
status as Status, 
dateread as Read, 
contribution as Contribution
FROM "50 Literature Notes"
WHERE contains(tags, "DataLitReview")
SORT status DESC, read DESC
```

You can also use this to track which literature you haven’t yet read or synthesized, or where data gaps exist, e.g.:

This can be helpful when you are given a reading list or folder of readings for a class, course, workshop or conference that you need to work through.