IDLab and Iran University of Science and Technology Launch a Series of Educational Seminars for Young Researchers

The first seminar of the new educational cycle, organized by the International Laboratory of Intangible-driven Economy (IDLab) of HSE University jointly with the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), took place on October 31, 2025.The series of events is aimed at developing young researchers' skills in preparing and publishing academic articles. The first seminar was dedicated to the literature review - both traditional and AI-driven methods of conducting it. The event was held within the framework of the HSE University's "International Academic Cooperation" project and gathered around 30 participants - PhD students and students from Russia and Iran.

The seminar moderator, Marina Zavertiaeva, Senior Research Fellow at IDLab, emphasized the critical importance of working with academic literature: "A literature review is not just a supporting stage, but an independent genre that helps a researcher define their place in the academic community and find their own niche."

The seminar consisted of three parts.

In the first part, Evgenia Shenkman, Junior Research Fellow at IDLab, spoke about contemporary approaches to the automation of literature reviews. She presented methods that allow for the automatic or semi-automatic searching, analysis, and summarizing of academic sources. Evgenia paid special attention to data analysis using statistical tools (such as LDA) and neural network models (BERTopic), which allow researchers to identify key research topics based on article abstracts.

The second part was conducted as a practical workshop led by Nikita Matkin, Research Assistant at IDLab. He demonstrated how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to systematize academic publications. Participants learned how to compile a database of abstracts on a specific topic and then how to use AI to extract key research characteristics from the texts: aims, hypotheses, research questions, methods, and theoretical frameworks. The result of the workshop was a structured Excel file, including hundreds of articles with the extracted entities.

The final presentation belonged to Professor Ángel Barajas from the University of Vigo (Spain). He focused in detail on the aims and structure of the literature review as part of an academic article, emphasizing its role in systematizing knowledge and identifying research gaps. The professor highlighted the importance of a researcher's personal involvement in reading and comprehending texts, adding: "No technology can replace live reading; you must read."

This seminar was the first in a series of planned educational events by IDLab and the Iran University of Science and Technology. The event was organized as part of the Joint Basic Research Project 'International Academic Cooperation of HSE University'