Literature Review Generation

Generate section-by-section literature reviews from your research session with accurate citations and figure extraction.

After a Deep Research session completes, Omnilib can generate a full literature review from the papers it found. The review is written section by section, with citations verified against the actual papers in your session.

Generating a literature review

  1. Open a completed research session from the sidebar.
  2. Click Generate Literature Review in the session toolbar.
  3. Choose an output format: Markdown or LaTeX.
  4. Click Generate.

The Literature Review Viewer opens and shows the review as it is written, section by section.

How generation works

Literature review generation uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). For each section of the review:

  1. The AI retrieves the most relevant papers from your session's result set.
  2. It writes the section grounded in those specific papers.
  3. Citations are inserted inline using the paper metadata.
  4. Each claim is checked against the retrieved abstracts before being included.

This process keeps the review grounded in papers you actually have access to and significantly reduces hallucinated citations.

Citation verification

Before the final review is delivered, Omnilib runs a citation check:

  • Confirms that every cited paper exists in your session's paper set.
  • Flags any claim where the cited paper's abstract does not support the statement.
  • Marks uncertain citations with a warning indicator in the viewer.

Review flagged citations before using the document. Click any flagged citation to see the paper's abstract alongside the claim.

Figure extraction

If your session includes papers downloaded as PDFs, Omnilib can extract figures and charts using OCR:

  • Figures are extracted and stored alongside the literature review.
  • Each figure is labeled with the paper it came from.
  • You can insert extracted figures into the review manually by dragging them into the text.

Note: Figure extraction requires PDFs to be downloaded into your project. Papers accessed by abstract only do not support figure extraction.

Literature Review Viewer

The viewer shows the formatted review with:

  • Section headings matching the structure of your research plan
  • Inline citations in the selected format
  • Flagged citations highlighted in amber
  • A citation panel on the right that lists all cited papers

Saving the review

Click Save in the viewer toolbar to open the save dialog. Choose a location in your project and confirm. The file is saved as .md or .tex depending on the format you selected.

Export formats

Markdown

Produces a standard Markdown file with citations in a reference list at the bottom:

## Background

Transformer architectures have shown strong performance across sequence modeling tasks [Smith et al., 2022].

## References

- Smith, J. et al. (2022). Attention is all you need. *NeurIPS*.

LaTeX

Produces a .tex file with a .bib file for bibliography entries:

\section{Background}

Transformer architectures have shown strong performance across
sequence modeling tasks \cite{smith2022attention}.

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{review}

The .bib file is saved alongside the .tex file and can be used directly with BibLaTeX or BibTeX.

Tip: If you plan to incorporate the review into an existing LaTeX project, use LaTeX export and merge the .bib entries into your project's bibliography file.

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