Try Wonders for freeWhat a psychology literature review actually involves
Psychology asks for something most undergraduate reviews do not: a critical reading of how each study was done. A review that summarises findings and stops there gets marked down. The expectation is that you notice the sample size, the design, whether the hypothesis was preregistered, and whether the effect has held up since.
That expectation has a date attached to it. In 2015 the Open Science Collaboration published "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science" in Science (349(6251), doi:10.1126/science.aac4716). The team ran replications of 100 studies published in three psychology journals. Ninety-seven per cent of the original studies had statistically significant results; 36% of the replications did. Replication effects were, on average, about half the size of the originals. Every supervisor in the field has an opinion about that paper, and your review is being read by someone who does.
The specific problems
Abstracts are not enough. The information that decides whether a finding is worth citing — N, power, preregistration, the exact measure used — lives in the method section, often several pages in. Any tool that only reads abstracts will mislead you on exactly the point your marker cares about.
The discipline has its own index. APA PsycInfo describes itself as "the premier abstracting and indexing database covering the behavioral and social sciences from the authority in psychology", with "over 5,000,000 peer-reviewed records" and "144 million cited references", searched through its own thesaurus. Departments often expect a PsycInfo search specifically, with the thesaurus terms shown.
Preprints changed the reading list. A good deal of current psychology appears on a preprint server before, or instead of, a journal. Preprints are legitimate to cite and must be cited as preprints, not as articles — our guide on preprints and working papers has the formats.
APA 7 is strict and everywhere. It governs the reference list, the in-text form, and a good deal of how the report itself is laid out.
What Wonders does for those problems
- Finds the literature broadly. No index of its own: OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar — over 320 million scholarly works — plus Google Patents. That includes preprints and the adjacent literature in neuroscience, education and health that a psychology topic usually touches.
- Takes you to the method section, fast. Where full text is available, citations in a summary carry the page number, and clicking one opens the PDF at that page. That is the single most useful thing here for a discipline that reads methods. Highlighting is yours to do once you are there; Wonders does not mark the passage for you.
- Does not let a quote through unchecked. Before showing a direct quote, Wonders looks for those words in the paper's text. If it cannot find them, it does not present them as a quote.
- Shows journal standing. SCImago quartiles for more than 28,000 journals feed ranking and filtering. Our guide on journal quality and predatory journals covers what that does and does not tell you.
- Builds the search out loud. The Boolean builder shows the query it runs, so the strategy is something you can put in an appendix and adapt for a PsycInfo thesaurus search.
- Writes with citations attached. Inline citations in the notebook, automatic bibliography in APA 7 among six styles, export to DOCX, PDF, LaTeX, HTML, BibTeX, RIS or CSV, save to Zotero, import
.ris,.biband.nbib. - Chat with one paper, after login, when you want to interrogate a single method section.
Citation provenance and the supervisor audit view, real-time co-editing and project-wide chat are in beta.
What Wonders does not do, and what to use instead
| The job | Does Wonders do it? | What to use |
|---|---|---|
| Search APA PsycInfo with its thesaurus | No | PsycInfo through your library |
| Screening for a systematic review or meta-analysis | No | A dedicated screening tool; ask your librarian what is licensed |
| Extract effect sizes or build a data table | No | A spreadsheet, or the meta-analysis software your department teaches |
| Flag retractions, failed replications or preregistration | No | The journal's own record, the publisher's retraction notices, and the study's preregistration |
| Judge whether a study is any good | No | You, reading the method section |
| Write the report, or paraphrase a source | No, deliberately | Nothing |
Use something else if your project is a meta-analysis or a registered systematic review. The screening and extraction stages are the method, and Wonders has neither.
Wonders is a reasonable fit if you are writing a narrative review, a dissertation introduction or a research proposal and the work is finding the right literature, reading it properly and keeping the citations straight. Start with how to write a research question if the topic is still moving.
What it costs
Plus is $20 a month, or $144 a year — $12 a month. Verified students pay $10 a month, or $72 a year — $6 a month. There is a 14-day free trial and no free plan. See pricing.