Date: October 2025
Hosted by: Digital Research and Innovation Lab (AI in Research series)
Instructors: Jessica Breen, PhD (Program Director, Geospatial Research Support) and Ashley Roccamo, PhD (Head, Digital Reseach and Innovation Lab)
Tags: AI • Literature Reviews • Research Tools • Workshop
This session is part of the AI Tools in Research series hosted by the Digital Research and Innovation Lab, focused on helping graduate students use emerging tools to explore, organize, and communicate research more effectively. In this workshop, we’ll reframe the literature review not as a writing assignment, but as a discovery process grounded in digital scholarship. We’ll begin with the research you already know—articles from your coursework, advisor recommendations, and foundational texts in your field—and show how AI-supported tools like Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, and Research Rabbit can help you follow citation networks, trace conceptual lineages, and identify related work across disciplines. Along the way, we’ll demonstrate how tools like Zotero and LibKey Nomad can streamline your research workflow and help you manage your growing body of sources. Whether you’re starting a thesis, preparing for comps, or just learning to navigate the scholarly conversation, this session offers practical, research-focused strategies for using AI to build an intentional, well-scoped literature review.
- Slides (PDF):
documents/slides.pdf - Handout (PDF):
documents/handout.pdf
- Purpose of the Literature Review
- Using AI tools to trace citation networks and conceptual lineages
- Google Scholar
- Semantic Scholar
- Research Rabbit
- Managing sources with Zotero and LibKey Nomad
- Strategies for scoping and organizing a scholarly conversation
This workshop is part of the AI Tools in Research series hosted by the Digital Research and Innovation Lab.
Breen, J. and A. Roccamo. (2025). AI Tools for Research: Getting Started with Literature Reviews (workshop materials).
Geospatial Research Lab, American University Library.
https://github.com/GeospatialResearchLab/workshop-ai-lit-review-2025