Among the most frequent questions I get about my dissertation journey is: “How much does AI actually help you with the workload?” It’s a fair question — and one that research has already begun to answer. There is growing evidence that AI tools can indeed lighten the load in academic writing, especially when it comes to systematic literature reviews.
What is a Systematic Literature Review (SLR)?
A systematic literature review is a genre of research designed to synthesize and structure dispersed knowledge on a particular phenomenon. Instead of cherry-picking a few articles, you systematically gather, screen, and analyze a large body of work. That means reading dozens (sometimes hundreds) of studies and extracting sence, but alos details such as:
The intellectual challenge lies in interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing these findings. But the practical challenge — and the part where AI can really help — is managing the overwhelming amount of reading, extracting, and structuring.
Speechify – Listening Instead of Reading
The first year of a PhD is all about reading – articles, books, conference papers, you name it. But if, like me, you have dyslexia and you sometimes struggle with long reading sessions (or if you simply process information better through listening), this can be exhausting. Enter Speechify. It reads aloud articles for you, so you can listen instead of reading or read and listen. For me, listening, especially a coulpe of very well written articles to improve my writing, has been making a difference. It helps me absorb complex material more effectively – and when the texts are particularly challenging, combining reading and listening really seals the learning.
Elicit – The Research Assistant for Systematic Reviews
If Speechify helps you consume articles, Elicit helps you organize them. Elicit is an AI tool designed to support systematic literature reviews – the very genre that defined my first PhD year at VU Amsterdam.
Systematic reviews require not just reading dozens (or hundreds) of articles but also extracting key details:
Doing this by hand is tedious and error-prone. Elicit speeds up the process by suggesting additional relevant articles, extracting structured information into customizable columns, linking each output directly to the source text. The crucial part: it doesn’t replace your intellectual work. You still need to interpret, critique, and synthesize. But Elicit removes much of the “trivia transcription” and helps you focus on the real value-add — your questions, assumptions, and arguments. The tool provides you feedback: in the sense that once you start going through the answers to your questions or categories, you immediately realise your own imprecision.
Miro – The Whiteboard That Never Ends
Finally, a tool that isn’t strictly AI, but I couldn’t leave it out: Miro, the best gift the Pandemic gave us (that is, beyond weird coping mechanisms and a darker shade of humor). If you don’t know it yet, imagine an infinite digital whiteboard where you can map, cluster, and rearrange your thoughts visually – with an unlimited supply of post-its.
For me, Miro is where my dissertation ideas start to breathe, move and evolve. I use it to:
Miro makes thinking playful again. Instead of staring at a blank page, I move shapes around until the structure of my argument starts to emerge.
These three tools — Speechify, Elicit, and Miro — have shaped how I read, digest, and structure my dissertation work. They haven’t replaced the intellectual effort; if anything, they’ve raised the bar by giving me space to ask sharper questions, build stronger arguments and produce the output worthy of these tools.
As I write this in mid-September, I still have three months to finish my systematic literature review. With these tools taking care of the mundane tasks and propelling the intellectual work, I’m hopeful that I’ll end the year strong – with a paper that truly reflects the quality of the work (both human and machine) that went into it.
