From question to citation: Accelerate your literature review with LeapSpace

Building foundations under pressure

Literature reviews are the standard way to digest and synthesize a collection of research findings, useful both to understand the state of knowledge or argue for directions to pursue. For early-career researchers, writing a literature review is often the first step to building a research career.

With the volume of published research growing exponentially every year, evaluating high-quality, relevant research grows equally daunting. Coupled with increasing pressures on researchers, time to explore feels limited.

LeapSpace^TM, Elsevier’s research-grade AI workspace, gives you more power over that time. Built for the way researchers work, LeapSpace’s environment accelerates discovery and vetting, so you can devote more time to what matters most: understanding the conversation in your field well enough to add something new to it.

Enhancing your insight, not replacing it

A good literature review also establishes trust: if others can follow your process, it conveys both confidence in the findings and credibility that you bring as a contributor to the field.

Many academics fear that using AI for literature reviews means taking a shortcut around engaging meaningfully with the literature – trying for insight without the work of understanding.

LeapSpace draws on 20+ million full-text peer-reviewed articles and books from Elsevier, over 1,000 content licensing partners, and 100+ million scientific records from 7,000+ publishers on Scopus. With this corpus as the foundation, LeapSpace draws only on peer-reviewed sources, so you spend less time filtering out non-existent or poor-quality citations.

LeapSpace is designed with the understanding that trust and insight is not something a tool can demonstrate without you. Instead of a shortcut, Rick Misra, a Principal Product Manager for Embedded Innovation, describes how LeapSpace becomes a researcher’s partner: “LeapSpace is built around foundational knowledge – a scaffold on which you build deeper, more nuanced knowledge as you evolve with it.”

Four steps from question to citation with LeapSpace

While there are many forms of literature review, the process broadly follows these four steps: Explore, Validate, Evaluate and Synthesize.

Below, we share how to use LeapSpace’s capabilities for these steps.

Explore: Asking the right questions using LeapSpace

Good research starts with a good research question, which can greatly influence the outcome of any investigation. LeapSpace uses RAG-supported semantic search technology, offering more flexibility for your query compared with traditional Boolean keyword searches, empowering your questions for a faster discovery process.

Rick explains, "LeapSpace gives you a holistic view of a topic by searching and comparing peer-reviewed research across a broad spectrum of domains. With provenance deeply baked into the experience, you always know exactly where a finding comes from, the strength of the resource, and how well-supported it is. That approach gives you the opportunity to tackle a problem from multiple vantage points while remaining grounded in high-quality content."

How you ask depends on the intention: are you familiar with the field, or just getting your bearings? LeapSpace queries can be shaped to meet your needs for any research stage.

Developing field awareness – going broad

When orienting to a new field, you first need to gain a sense of what questions should lead. Simply start with a query that describes in your own words what you want to explore and why. LeapSpace optimizes your query and determines a strategy before conducting a publisher-neutral search of peer-reviewed literature. The search steps are transparent, so you can see how the results were identified and revise your question if needed.

LeapSpace then generates a structured topic response with citations, summarizes the findings or claims, and suggests follow-up questions to provoke your thinking process further. You can change direction, refine, or go deeper with follow-up queries.

These results help you build hypotheses or a specific research question to address in your review.

Refining for insight – going deep

LeapSpace offers several ways to direct your query for responses more relevant to a specific research question:

• Interact within the context window. Rick notes that “you can have a meaningful back-and-forth. Researchers can question the output and push back.”

• Open Processing steps to review the detailed steps of your LeapSpace query, then refine – add a constraint relevant to your criteria, then rerun the query.

• Use Deep Research mode to gather resources for complex questions or cross-disciplinary investigations; surfacing overlaps that traditional search methods may not find.

Rick notes, "Some of the biggest leaps in science happen at the intersection of disciplines. You need to surface hypotheses and assumptions and stress-test them against the literature. You need to search broadly but also keep your search grounded in peer-reviewed research, the tool can draw on it's depth of the academic record across domains to challenge your thinking and surface perspectives from adjacent fields and vantage points to expand your perspective on a topic along with citations from the sources."

Grounding queries – going precise

Precise queries can be more efficient. You can “ground” a query by setting constraint boundaries – for example, a relevant date, location, or methodology.

If you also upload papers or data relevant to your work, you can direct LeapSpace to reference those documents. Rick explains: “You can give a structured prompt that points to specific content within a PDF and ask LeapSpace to find additional work within that context – for example, to find recent work that has similar methods or materials.”

This is also known as seeding a profile. Rick notes, “a good way to seed is with research articles or reviews you’ve carefully curated over time. Then build by asking, ‘fetch me other things that align with this.’”

Validate: Inspecting key insights

Every review writer now faces the often-monumental task of screening: validating which papers fall within your review’s criteria and are worth a deeper look.

LeapSpace’s response will list several claims that address your question, each citing a collection of papers. A traditional Boolean search often results in hundreds of papers at the beginning of this process. A LeapSpace response focuses on recent and relevant content based on the context you provided in your query, helping you avoid an avalanche of irrelevant reading at the start of the process.

That reflects an aspect of discovery that shifts when using LeapSpace: its semantic search returns responses that are probabilistic (most likely to be relevant), not deterministic (specific matches to search terms and nothing more). This means the same exact query can return slightly different, equally valid answers at different moments in time.

Initial screening This shift means your evaluation matters more than ever. LeapSpace makes initial vetting faster with these built-in features:

• Every statement in LeapSpace’s response is annotated with citations you can open and examine in the same browser window.

• At a glance, Trust Cards show the basis, limits, and quality behind each citation. An excerpt from the original text shows the context where it appears.

• You can quickly scan the abstract for each cited paper for criteria that are part of your screening.

For your review to stand on a rigorous process, you need to vet the sources carefully and document your process.

Documenting and vetting the integrity behind research claims

Within the side panel of each cited reference you can follow links to the source paper for further vetting. You can also see how a paper’s claims fit in the larger literature field.

• Claim Radar helps you assess the positioning of a paper’s claims. Click the shield symbol by a claim, and LeapSpace scans papers across Scopus-indexed literature to show whether the wider body of research supports a claim, contradicts it, or has mixed views.

• Try Explore as table to view summaries of the Abstract, Methods, Results and Conclusions for each source in a table, which you can export as a CSV for further analysis. You can also create your own columns to view specific content categories.

• Use the keyword search terms from LeapSpace’s Processing steps to create a Boolean search in Scopus. This builds a deterministic search result which you can use to further validate the LeapSpace results. It also supports documentation of a reproducible process others can follow.

Evaluate: from integrity to insight with LeapSpace integrations

Once you’ve selected the papers to include in your review, engaging with each of them critically is essential to building a view of your own. LeapSpace integrates with tools that support reading and annotating in the full-text sources available through ScienceDirect and content partners.

• Use ScienceDirect’s Reading Assistant opens in new tab/windowfeatures to gain an overview of key insights before reading a full paper.

• Export paper metadata in BibTex, RIS, or CSV format for importing into reference managers or other research organization tools

• For even more efficiency, access Mendeley Reference Manageropens in new tab/window from within ScienceDirect or Scopus, or use the Mendeley web extension to capture papers in your reference library for reading and annotating. This also saves time later when inserting citations in your manuscript.

Interpretation and judgment remain with you – as does what you choose to include.

Synthesize: Challenge the narrative

Once you have formed your views on the literature, it’s good to also reflect on gaps in the evidence narrative.

Consider the scope of each paper and what kinds of bias may be influencing the findings. For example, are the results applicable to all geographies, populations, or timeframes? Does the methodology support the evidence claims?

Strengthen your challenge by using LeapSpace to interrogate these gaps. And you can also use LeapSpace’s new Writing Coach to evaluate your own claims or compare them with emerging research published since you began your review process. You could surface additional ideas for your review or confirm where future inquiry is needed.

Literature reviews with LeapSpace mean less friction, more flow

By connecting discovery and vetting in one environment, LeapSpace reduces the friction of task-switching between different tools. As part of an eco-system with built-in connections to tools for deeper reading, notetaking and reference management, you’re able to easily document and validate what you find and discover what you can contribute. With the addition of Writing Coach, LeapSpace’s research environment provides support for the full literature review workflow.

Writing a literature review will still have challenges, but with a research-grade AI workspace at your fingertips, they become the ones that inspire you rather than weigh you down. This means more time for exploring and creativity – the things that enticed you to become a researcher in the first place. And it also honors the integrity and creativity that spurs good research forward.

Next steps

For a demonstration of how to integrate LeapSpace in the review process, including how to evaluate semantic search results and how to turn AI outputs into reliable inputs for your work, check out the recording of our webinar, Using Generative and Agentic AI in the Literature Reviewopens in new tab/window.

Start accelerating your research workflow with LeapSpaceopens in new tab/window