I'm a biotech major who spent more time fighting PDFs than doing actual science
I took a research internship this semester for credits. Biotech major, so the expectation was wet lab work and literature reviews. The lab part was fine. The literature review part broke me.
I had 40+ tabs open at any given time. I would find a paper, read it, trace its citations, open five more papers, lose track of which ones I had already read, and somehow end up further from understanding the field than when I started. My advisor would ask "did you read [important foundational paper]?" and I would not have even seen it because it was buried three citation layers deep from where I started.
The thing that frustrated me most was not the volume — it was the lack of structure. Google Scholar gives you a list. You search, you get results, you open them one by one. But research does not work like a list. Papers cite each other, build on each other, disagree with each other. There is a whole network of relationships that you cannot see when you are just looking at a search results page.
I have a CS background (long story, wrong major) so I started building something that shows the citation network visually — like a map of how papers connect, what influenced what, and which foundational works you are probably missing. You can chat with it to explore topics and save papers to projects as you go. Still early but it is free to try:basedid.com
Genuinely curious though — how do you all handle literature reviews? Is there a system that works or does everyone just brute force it and hope they did not miss something important?