Research writing13 min read
Literature review
Turn a body of research into a defensible literature review.
Carrel is a literature review tool for PhD and master’s researchers: import the papers you have, extract the claims with their passages attached, see where the papers agree and disagree, and draft each section with citations that open the source.
Where a literature review actually stalls
Finding the papers is the part that works. The review stalls afterwards: forty PDFs read, a notes file that stopped being useful around page four, and a chapter that is still one summary after another because nothing shows how the papers relate.
A literature review is not a list of what each paper found. It is an argument about what the field knows, where it disagrees with itself and what it has not yet answered, with the evidence for each of those attached. The work in between is holding all of that in view at once, and that is the work most tools skip.
How it works
What Carrel does, in the order it happens
01Bring in the papers you already have
Import a Zotero library or a few of its collections, drop in PDFs, or paste a DOI or an arXiv id. Metadata is filled in from Crossref and OpenAlex, and every paper is parsed into passages you can search, read and cite.
02Read properly, and ask the papers
Highlight, keep notes on the page, and ask questions that are answered only from your own library. Every sentence of an answer carries a citation that opens the paper at the passage, and when the evidence is not there you are told so instead of guessed at.
03Extract the claims, not just the papers
Claims, methods, findings and limitations come out of each paper with their exact quotes attached. They are the unit a review is built from, and each one keeps its link back to where it was said.
04See agreement, contradiction and the gap
Claims are linked by what supports, contradicts, qualifies or extends what. The synthesis matrix your supervisor keeps asking for arrives filled in, and the places where nobody has an answer are flagged.
05Draft each section from its evidence
Carrel proposes sections from what you have read and drafts each one from the passages behind it, arguing where the papers disagree. Rewrite it, cut it, and export to Word, LaTeX or Markdown with the citations intact.
Guides
The method, without the product
Where to begin when the folder is full and the page is blank.
Synthesis13 min read
How to Synthesize a Literature Review Without Writing One Summary per Paper
How to write about what the papers say together, instead of one at a time.
Research writing13 min read
Thesis Writer’s Block: What to Do When You’ve Read Everything but Still Can’t Write
What to do when the reading is done and the writing will not start.
Questions people ask
More in the full FAQ.
- Will it write my literature review for me?
- No, and it is not trying to. It gets you past the blank page: the papers read and indexed, the claims extracted with their quotes, the agreements and contradictions mapped, and a first draft of a section you chose, cited to the passages behind it. The argument is yours.
- How do I know the citations are real?
- Every citation is a link to a specific passage in a paper you imported, not a string a model typed. Click it and the reader opens at that page. Nothing is asserted without a source, and when the evidence is not in your library the assistant says so rather than guessing.
- Do I have to leave Zotero?
- No. Import a library or a few collections with their PDFs whenever you like; papers already in Carrel are skipped, so the import can be run again. Zotero stays your reference manager if you want it to.
- What is the research graph for?
- Claims, methods and findings are extracted from your papers with their exact quotes, then linked by what supports, contradicts, qualifies or extends what. Those relations are what make a review paragraph argue instead of list — when you draft, a contradiction comes through as contrast rather than as another item in a sequence.