Required from Week 2 · One notebook, all fifteen-plus sources, all semester
NotebookLM holds every article you collect — and answers questions using only those articles.
NotebookLM (notebooklm.google.com) is a free research tool from Google with one property that makes it different from every chatbot you've used: it is grounded. You upload your sources — the actual PDFs of the articles in your literature review — and it answers questions using only those documents, citing the exact passage every claim came from. Ask ChatGPT about your topic and it answers from the entire internet, sometimes inventing citations that don't exist. Ask your notebook and it answers from your fifteen articles, with a footnote you can click to see the original sentence.
That property matters here for three reasons. First, your sources live in one place. By Week 7 you will have fifteen or more PDFs; by finals week, likely twenty. Scattered across downloads folders and email attachments, they rot. In one notebook, they are searchable as a collection — which is exactly how a literature review has to treat them. Second, it lets you interrogate your literature as a whole. The skill of Week 4 — synthesis, seeing across studies instead of summarizing them one at a time — is precisely what querying a full notebook rehearses. Third, every answer is checkable. The citation takes you back to the source, and going back to the source is the habit this course exists to build.
A notebook does not read for you, and it does not write for you — the AI policy below draws that line in bold. It is a filing cabinet that answers questions and shows its receipts.
1 · Sign in with your SJNY account. Go to notebooklm.google.com and sign in with your SJNY Google account — the University's license covers NotebookLM, and your capstone work belongs on your University account rather than a personal one. The source limit is far more than this project needs.
2 · Create one notebook. Click "Create new" and name it PSY 460 Capstone — [Your Topic]. One notebook for the whole semester. Do not make a new notebook per week or per assignment; the whole point is that your literature accumulates in one place.
3 · Name the file before you upload it. As you collect articles (starting with your ten candidates in Week 2), save each full-text PDF into the references subfolder of your seminar folder — and rename it as you save it: first author, year, and most of the title, as in Neff (2023) Self-compassion, self-esteem, and well-being.pdf. Use "et al." when there are several authors, and swap any colon in the title for a hyphen, since a filename cannot hold one. Skip the journal, volume, issue, and pages — you don't need them. Then add that same file to your notebook. Upload the full text, not the abstract: abstracts are advertisements, and a notebook full of advertisements answers like one.
4 · Check the source name in the notebook. NotebookLM names each source by its filename, so if you named the file properly in step 3, this is already done — and when your notebook cites something, you will know instantly which paper it means. If a source still reads fulltext(3).pdf, rename it here. The habit is not housekeeping: author and year is the format your entire reference list runs on, and you may as well start seeing your literature that way in Week 2.
5 · Deposit your exports (you cannot share the notebook itself). SJNY places student and faculty accounts on separate domains, and Google blocks NotebookLM sharing across that line — so the Share button will not reach me, whatever you type into it. Don't spend an afternoon on it; this is a limit of the platform, not something either of us can fix. What I see instead is what your notebook produces. Whenever you generate something worth keeping — a study guide, a briefing document, a report, an audio overview — save it into your seminar folder, on the Notebook LM exports tab of your journal or as a file in the folder itself. Text outputs export to Google Docs, slide decks to PowerPoint, and audio overviews as audio files, so everything lands in Drive in a click or two.
6 · Keep it current. Every article that enters your theme sort enters your notebook the same day — and its PDF enters the references subfolder of your seminar folder, where a source has to be to count toward your fifteen. That folder is what I read, and one that grows steadily across the semester tells the same story your journal does.
Week 2 — collection. Upload your ten candidate articles. Then ask: "What research questions do these sources address? What methods do they use?" Ten minutes with the answers tells you whether your candidates form a literature or a grab bag — before your topic locks.
Week 3 — dissection (in that order). Complete your article-dissection worksheets yourself first. The worksheet is the skill; outsourcing it teaches the tool and not you. Then ask the notebook about the same article — "What were the IVs, DVs, and key limitations of Smith (2021)?" — and compare. Where the notebook surfaced something you missed, go back to the PDF and find it. That comparison is a comprehension check you can run on every article all semester.
Week 4 — synthesis. This is where the notebook earns its keep. Ask cross-cutting questions: "Which sources measure self-esteem, and how do their measures differ?" "Where do these studies disagree?" "What populations has this literature ignored?" The answers are leads for your theme sort — verify each against the PDFs; never copy them. The theme sort you submit must be built, and worded, by you. This is optional: do it only if it fits inside your four hours.
Weeks 5–6 — the gap and the theme sections. Pressure-test your gap statement: "Do any of my sources already test whether X affects Y?" If the notebook finds one that does, better to learn it now than from me. As you draft each theme section, ask which sources speak to it — a fast way to spot the section resting on a single reference.
Week 9 — measures. Ask: "What instruments do my sources use to measure [construct], and what reliability do they report?" Then pull the actual numbers from the PDFs for your Measures paragraphs — the notebook points, the source provides.
Weeks 7, 10–12 — while writing and revising. The notebook is your fact-checker: "Did Neff (2023) actually claim this, or am I remembering it wrong?" Checking a claim against the source before you cite it is the single most professorial habit you can steal. What you may not do is have the notebook draft your prose — see the line below.
This course's disclosed-use AI policy applies to NotebookLM exactly as it applies to any other AI tool. The notebook's answers are AI-generated summaries — and submitting AI-generated summaries as your own writing is never permitted, in any draft, worksheet, journal entry, or theme sort. Do not paste notebook output into your seminar Docs. Do not lightly reword notebook output and type it in; paraphrasing a machine is not writing.
What NotebookLM is sanctioned for: storing and organizing your sources; locating which source said what; checking your comprehension after you've done the reading; asking cross-cutting questions whose answers you verify in the PDFs; and fact-checking your own claims against your own sources before you submit. Used this way, it is precisely the kind of "defined support task" the policy permits.
Log it. Substantive notebook queries — anything that shaped your thinking, your theme sort, or your draft — get an entry on your journal's AI LOG tab like any other AI use: date, tool ("NotebookLM"), what you asked, what you did with the answer. "Asked my notebook which sources measured anxiety; verified in the PDFs; added two scales to my Measures section" is a perfect entry, and an honest log entry is never penalized. Routine housekeeping (uploading a PDF, renaming a source) needs no entry.
One more reason this arrangement protects you: your writing happens in seminar Docs whose revision history I can see, and your notebook use is disclosed in your log. A student who reads deeply, queries their notebook, verifies against sources, and drafts in their own words in their own Doc has nothing to fear from any integrity question — the whole trail shows the work is theirs.
It cannot find literature. A notebook only knows what you feed it. Searching is Week 2's skill, and it happens in PsycINFO and Google Scholar — not here.
It cannot replace reading. Our weekly meetings are conversations about your articles, and thirty minutes of questions reveals within about ninety seconds whether your understanding comes from the papers or from summaries of the papers. The notebook checks reading you have done; it cannot substitute for reading you haven't.
It can still be wrong. Grounding makes fabrication rare, not impossible — the notebook can misread a table, over-generalize a finding, or miss the qualifier that changes a claim's meaning. That is why every citation is clickable: click it. Never move a notebook-sourced claim toward your paper without seeing the original passage with your own eyes.