How to Do Literature Review

Please check the guidance from Jack Baker: 

https://www.jackwbaker.com/advice/Literature_review.html

One of the key suggestions from him is to read papers with a goal and an aim. 

Here is my addition:

It is helpful to organize findings from literature review in the form of graphs and figures. For example, it is good to create a single page slide to summarize a paper and briefly note about why the paper is interesting and how it aligns with the research you are working on. The following Fig 1 shows you some examples I created. A slide like this is great to be included in a weekly report or a semester report for your PhD. These collections of publications will help you to answer questions from me like: What are their applications? What are their limitations? What simulation they used? Can you quickly recreate their work? etc.

Literature reviews also help us create introductory tables and figures when drafting papers. This is one of the best ways to highlight the novelty of the work to potential readers. A good introductory figure can directly show reader why this work is important and what is the key breakthrough. For example, Fig 2 summarizes the literature review included into our Nature Communications paper on thick origami structures - "This work" bubble shows clearly that our work wants to target a design space that has not been explored yet.

Also please check out the review practice from "Prepare to Write Your First Paper"