[austinjp]

While your dashboard sounds fancy, this part raises issues:

> I run ChatGPT Pro to collect all relevant papers

Any literature review must be reproducible. If you can't say exactly what queries you ran against exactly what databases, you'll get into trouble. Whether or not that's the way things should be is irrelevant: it's the way things are.

You should ask your supervisor if your approach is okay. If necessary, ask it from a theoretical perspective: "would it be okay if I were to....?" If your supervisor is unavailable then seek advice from their colleagues.

Since you mention ADHD, you're likely to be strongly motivated by novelty. Don't spend time building a dashboard that you could spend on writing your thesis. If you're not getting support from your university, get it now. It might not help, but it's a signal to the university that you're engaging with the system.

[BrenBarn]

> Any literature review must be reproducible.

That's totally at odds with my understanding, but perhaps this differs between fields.

[austinjp]

Quite probably there are differences between fields. In biomedical literature reviews the search terms and databases are detailed, and (in systematic reviews) a PRISMA flowchart [0] provided. The theory being that other researchers could repeat the searches and the in/out decisions and get the same stack of papers to review.

[0] https://www.prisma-statement.org/prisma-2020-flow-diagram

[BrenBarn]

Okay yeah that sounds closer to what I'd call a meta-analysis. In linguistics (which is the field I was in) "literature review" just means "someone looked around and read some papers they thought might be related". There's no expectation that it will be systematic in any replicable way.

[latand6]

Can you really reproduce it though?

I thought it’s the experiments that have to be able to reproduce, not the literature review

[austinjp]

Whether you can or can't in reality is moot, unfortunately. The literature search in biomedical fields should indeed be theoretically reproducible. I don't know about other fields, but it would seem odd to me if a search was not reproducible, that would lead to a very arbitrary literature selection.

As for the experiments, yes, in experimental fields. But in all (most?) fields, including non-experimental, the whole process should be well documented so it could be reproduced end-to-end if possible. If it's not reproducible there should be good, well explained reasons why not.

Note that reproduciblity does not necessarily mean the exact same answer will definitely emerge, just that the methods can be followed closely.

[latand6]

Got that, thanks for the advice, I'll ask my supervisor how to address that properly

[gsch1]

Yes, you must be able to reproduce the results. If reproduction is not possible, the work lacks scientific validity.