most effective way to get through lit reviews?
hey all, i'm starting my master's this fall and am outlining my thesis to get a head start (yes, i spoke with my advisor about it). i did a senior/undergraduate thesis last spring and really struggled with efficiently reading and absorbing the content of all the papers that i ended up citing in my work. i feel that my current note-taking/source-tracking system doesn't really help me all that much, and for every hour i spend on research, i spend twice as much just trying to understand the papers and wrangle them.
my current system is to gather all of them in an ADS library sorted by topic/argument, read the abstracts, key figures + captions, and conclusions (and the other sections if necessary), and then leave a little note to myself in my bibtex file explaining the main takeaways. this was the method suggested to me by my mentors, but even that can take a long time because i find that i rarely need "just the gist" of a paper and my summary ends up being too vague. more often than not, i need to go back and find exact numbers to compare against my own result, and digging through the entire paper (sometimes only finding that the paper doesn't cite a number) takes forever.
my master's thesis will likely require even more reading and comparing, so i need to figure out how to make this process more efficient. do any of you have any strategies or tools for getting through lit review as efficiently as possible?