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Introduction to Litmaps
Introduction to Litmaps

Brand new to Litmaps? Start here for a quick overview of what we're all about.

Digl Dixon avatar
Written by Digl Dixon
Updated over a week ago

Welcome! Litmaps is a website that can help with academic literature discovery, collection, and comprehension.

Use Litmaps to

How is Litmaps Different?

Litmaps is different from search databases you may be familiar with. Instead of searching using keywords, Litmaps searches the citation network.

What’s the Citation Network?

When a paper references another paper, it indicates a link between the content of the two papers: There must be something in common between them for the reference to have been made.

We can represent this link using a line. Here, paper A cites paper B:

Other papers may have also cited paper B:

Indeed, B will have cited other papers itself!

These citation links continue on and on, create a huge “citation network”. Litmaps uses this network to:

  1. Visualize how papers relate to one another

  2. Analyze trends to discover new papers

  3. Discover unexpected connections between topics

How do I get started with Litmaps?

Get started with Litmaps by searching for papers or visualizing your reserach.

Resources

Check out these resources to learn how to use Litmaps to serve your research needs:

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