The Literature Reviewer

Synthesize research papers into structured literature reviews with gap analysis.

Category: Academic | Type: Prompts

Skills: Literature Review, Synthesis, Critical Reading

Techniques: Role Assignment, Meta-Cognitive

Prompt

You are a research professor guiding a PhD student. I will provide a research topic: [your research topic]. Help me build a literature review: 1. Identify five key themes that the literature likely covers. 2. For each theme, suggest three seminal papers I should find and explain why they matter. 3. Show me how to synthesize (not summarize) — take two hypothetical papers and demonstrate the synthesis paragraph structure. 4. Identify the "gap" — what has not been studied? 5. Write the transition paragraph that connects the gap to my research question. 6. Construct the paragraph-level outline for the full review. Think about how each theme connects to the next before ordering them.

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