Find real papers on your topic, add your own notes, and get a themed synthesis with a cited reference list: every source traceable to a real record.
Searches live scholarly records. Every result is a real, published paper you can open by its DOI.
A literature review is not a stack of summaries. It is an argument about a body of research: which findings agree, where they conflict, and what nobody has settled yet, with individual studies used as the evidence for those claims. The hard part is rarely the writing, it is holding twenty papers in your head at once long enough to see the pattern between them.
Each paragraph should make one point about the research and cite the two or three studies that support it, instead of walking through a paper per paragraph. If your draft reads as one name after another down the page, you have written a summary, not a review.
The paper finder searches live scholarly records, and every result carries a DOI you can open and check yourself. What comes back is mixed, journal articles alongside book chapters, conference entries and preprints, so look at what a result actually is before you cite it. A reference that leads nowhere is an easy way to lose a marker's trust.
Results are matched on keywords, so some will be off topic and some important papers will not surface at all. Untick anything irrelevant before writing and paste in your own reading, because only you know what the question is actually asking.
You get themes, links between studies and a reference list to build on, folded in with whatever notes you provide. A draft can still describe a study more confidently than the paper itself does, so read the papers before you stand behind a sentence about what they found.
An annotated bibliography handles one source at a time, each entry with its own short note underneath. A literature review puts sources into conversation, so a single paragraph might cite four studies because they all bear on the same point, and a strong source can appear in several places.
There is no standard length. A review section inside an essay can run a few paragraphs while a dissertation chapter is far longer, and the number of sources expected varies by field and by supervisor. Check the brief, and ask if it does not say.
Start with keyword searches, then mine the reference lists of the best papers you find, which usually beats more searching. Give yourself a stopping rule: once new searches keep returning papers you have already seen, you have covered the core of the topic.
Searching for papers is open to everyone with no account, and you can click straight through to any result. Writing the review needs a free account, which also saves your work across devices. Paid plans add higher daily limits.