The Literature Review Challenge
A literature review is one of the most tab-intensive tasks in academia. You are not reading one paper. You are reading dozens, sometimes hundreds, while tracking how they relate to each other, what they argue, where they agree, and where they contradict. Each paper you read leads to more papers through its citations. The web of sources grows faster than you can process it.
In practice, this means your Chrome browser becomes the primary workspace for the review. You have journal articles open in tabs, Google Scholar searches running, university library portals loaded, and PDF viewers fighting for screen space. Without the right tools, this turns into a mess that slows you down exactly when you need to be productive.
The extensions in this guide address the four core needs of a literature review workflow: finding sources, saving citations, annotating what you read, and managing the tabs that accumulate along the way.
Source Discovery Extensions
Google Scholar Button
The Google Scholar Button extension adds a small icon to your Chrome toolbar that lets you search Google Scholar from any webpage. Highlight a term, click the icon, and you get a dropdown of academic results. It also shows citation data and direct links to PDF versions when available.
During a literature review, this is invaluable for following up on concepts as you encounter them. You are reading a paper that mentions "cognitive load theory," and you want to see the foundational work on it. Highlight the term, click, and the key papers appear without leaving your current tab. It keeps you in flow rather than forcing a context switch to a separate Scholar search.
Price: Free. Best for: Quick lookups and citation chasing during reading sessions.
Semantic Scholar (TLDR Extension)
Semantic Scholar's extension adds brief summaries and related paper recommendations to journal article pages. When you open a paper on PubMed, arXiv, or other supported platforms, you see a sidebar with an AI-generated summary (called a TLDR), the paper's key citations, and a list of related work. This helps you decide whether a paper is worth reading in full before you commit time to it.
Price: Free. Best for: Quickly evaluating whether a paper is relevant to your review.
Citation Management Extensions
Zotero Connector
Zotero Connector is the most important extension on this list. When you are on a journal article page, a book listing, or a news article, clicking the Zotero icon saves the full bibliographic record to your Zotero library. It pulls metadata automatically: authors, title, journal, volume, issue, pages, DOI, and abstract. For PDFs, it downloads and attaches the file.
The Connector works with virtually every academic database: Google Scholar, PubMed, JSTOR, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, Springer, Wiley, and most university library catalogs. It handles books on Amazon and WorldCat, news articles, blog posts, and even YouTube videos. If a page has structured metadata, Zotero will extract it.
For a literature review, the workflow is: open a paper, evaluate it, and if it is relevant, click the Zotero icon to save it. By the end of your review, your Zotero library contains every source you might cite, with complete bibliographic data ready for export in any citation format.
Price: Free (Zotero itself is free and open source). Best for: Everyone doing citation-heavy research. This is non-negotiable.
Mendeley Web Importer
If your institution or research group uses Mendeley, the Web Importer provides similar one-click citation saving. It extracts metadata from academic pages and syncs to your Mendeley library. Mendeley has tighter integration with Elsevier journals (since Elsevier owns Mendeley) but a smaller ecosystem overall compared to Zotero.
Price: Free. Best for: Researchers already embedded in the Mendeley ecosystem.
| Feature | Zotero Connector | Mendeley Web Importer |
|---|---|---|
| Supported databases | Virtually all major databases | Most major databases |
| PDF auto-download | Yes | Yes |
| Citation styles | 10,000+ | 7,000+ |
| Word processor plugin | Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice | Word |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Price | Free | Free |
Annotation Extensions
Hypothesis
Hypothesis is a web annotation tool that lets you highlight and add notes to any webpage or PDF directly in Chrome. Your annotations are saved to your Hypothesis account and can be searched, tagged, and shared. For literature reviews, the ability to annotate a paper as you read it and later search across all your annotations by keyword or tag is a significant time-saver.
Hypothesis also supports group annotations. If you are doing a collaborative review with labmates or co-authors, you can create a group where everyone's annotations on shared papers are visible. This replaces the back-and-forth of emailing notes about specific passages.
Price: Free. Best for: Researchers who annotate heavily and want a searchable archive of their reading notes.
Liner
Liner is a simpler highlighting tool. It lets you highlight passages on web pages and PDFs and saves them to a personal library. It is less feature-rich than Hypothesis but faster for quick highlighting without notes. Some researchers use Liner for initial read-throughs (just highlighting key passages) and Hypothesis for deep annotation on papers they are analyzing closely.
Price: Free tier available. Best for: Quick highlighting during initial scans of papers.
Research Session Management
The Problem with Research Tabs
None of the tools above solve the fundamental browser problem: what happens to your 40 open research tabs when you need to stop for the day, switch to another project, or when Chrome decides to update itself? Citation managers save the bibliographic record. Annotation tools save your notes. But neither saves the working state of your browser -- which tabs are open, how they are organized, and what you were in the middle of reading.
TabGroup Vault for Research Sessions
TabGroup Vault fills this gap. It saves a snapshot of your Chrome tab groups, capturing every tab and its group assignment. For a literature review, this means you can organize your tabs by review section or theme, save the snapshot, and come back to it days or weeks later with everything intact.
TabGroup Vault
Save and restore research sessions organized by topic, paper, or review section. Free: 5 snapshots. Pro ($29 one-time): unlimited snapshots, bulk restore, Google Drive backup, 5 Chrome profiles, dark theme.
A practical research session workflow with all these extensions:
- Start a search session. Open Google Scholar or your database. Use tab groups to sort results by theme as you go.
- Save citations as you find them. Click the Zotero icon on every relevant paper.
- Annotate as you read. Use Hypothesis to highlight and note key passages.
- Save your session before stopping. Use TabGroup Vault to snapshot your current tab groups.
- Resume later. Restore the snapshot to pick up exactly where you left off.
Organizing Research by Paper vs. by Topic
Researchers often debate whether to organize tabs by individual paper or by broader topic. Both approaches work, and the best choice depends on your review's structure:
- By topic: Create tab groups like "Methodology," "Theoretical Framework," "Empirical Studies," "Contradictions." This works well for thematic literature reviews where you are synthesizing across papers.
- By paper: Create tab groups for each key paper, including the paper itself, its key citations, and related commentary. This works for systematic reviews or when you are doing deep analysis of specific papers.
- Hybrid: Start with topical groups for discovery, then create per-paper groups for the 5-10 papers you decide to analyze in depth.
For a deeper look at how tab groups map to research workflows, see our guide to managing 50+ academic sources in Chrome.
The Complete Research Extension Stack
Here is the recommended set of extensions for a research-focused Chrome setup:
| Extension | Purpose | Price | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zotero Connector | Citation capture and management | Free | Essential |
| Google Scholar Button | Quick academic lookups | Free | Essential |
| Hypothesis | Web annotation and highlighting | Free | Recommended |
| TabGroup Vault | Save and restore research sessions | Free / $29 Pro | Recommended |
| Semantic Scholar TLDR | Paper summaries and recommendations | Free | Nice to have |
That is five extensions total, which is light enough to avoid performance issues while covering the full research workflow from discovery to session management.
Tip: Export for Backup
Periodically export your Zotero library, your Hypothesis annotations, and your TabGroup Vault snapshots. Having backups in three places (citation data, reading notes, and session state) means no single point of failure can derail your review.
Getting Started
If you are about to start a literature review, here is the minimum you need:
- Install Zotero and its Chrome Connector. Start saving every relevant source from day one. Retroactively building a citation library is painful.
- Install TabGroup Vault. Save a snapshot at the end of every research session. This is your insurance policy against Chrome crashes and your context switch recovery tool.
- Use Chrome tab groups from the start. Even rough topical groups are better than no groups. You can refine the structure as your understanding of the literature develops.
Add Hypothesis and Google Scholar Button when you are ready to deepen your workflow. But the foundation -- citation management and session saving -- should be in place before you open your first search result.