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Analyzing Research Perspectives using Maps
Analyzing Research Perspectives using Maps

Maps aren't just for display purposes: analyze how topics intersect, see how research grows, and identify frontrunners in your field.

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

When diving into the thicket of detailed research, in can be easy to get lost in the weeds. Glancing up to view the broader literature landscape provides fresh perspective to let you better frame and guide research.

You can quickly see how papers in a particular research field relate using Litmaps Map, which shows each paper and their connections to others in a collection. By interacting with the visualisation you can answer questions like how has research in a particular field changed over time, or what are the key methods used to solve a particular problem.

Get new research perspectives via maps

You can use Maps to visualise an existing collection of papers, quickly organise them and view their interconnectedness. Maps represent each paper as a dot, with lines connecting papers that cite one another. By sorting papers using different parameters (publication date, number of citations, etc.), you can find new ways to visualise and understand your research.

Let’s set up a map to get started

Here’s how to set up your map:

  1. Click “New Map”

  2. Click “Add Articles” at the top of the page

    1. Add articles from Litmaps collections, reference managers, searches, etc. See our guide here for detailed instructions on how to add articles.

  3. Save your Map

    1. Press Save at the top

    2. Give your Map a name

    3. Click “Done”

Identify highly cited and important papers

You can quickly discern the two or three most heavily-cited and important papers in your collection by visualising based on citations and map relevance.

Map Relevance is a measure of how many citations a paper has to all others in the visualisation. The more connected it is, the more central it is to your topic.

To find the most relevant and impactful papers for your topic:

  1. Open up your map (or use the steps above to make a new one)

  2. Set x-axis to Cited By #

  3. Set y-axis to Map Relevance

  4. Click on papers towards the top right to find those with the most connections and citations.

Identify interdisciplinary connections

By visualising multiple collections at once — or just paying attention to the colours of the dots — you can use Maps to discover how research topics intersect. In order to get the most out of this method, be sure to pull in multiple libraries of papers into Litmaps. You can pull in papers either from an existing Litmaps collection or straight from a reference manager. But papers from a reference manager won’t be categorised or colour-coded until you add them to a collection.

To explore how papers interact across libraries:

  1. Open up your map (or use the steps above to make a new one)

  2. Identify the multi-coloured papers. Each colour denotes a different collection. Review their connections to see how the research in different collections overlaps.

Find the most influential articles in your field

When exploring research, we are often interested in quickly discerning the most influential papers in a field. Or, in finding which new papers are likely to have the biggest impact. For both these cases, we can use the Momentum measure to distinguish the most relevant and important papers in the map.

Momentum is calculated based on the number of citations a paper has adjusted for time. Time adjustment is important because it helps compensate for the inherent fact that the older a publication is, the more citations it’s likely to have. Thus, by adjusting for the recency of a publication, we can discern the potential impact more recent papers have from one another.

To find the most influential articles in your map:

  1. Open up your map (or use the steps above to make a new one)

  2. Set x-axis to Date

  3. Set y-axis to Cited By #

  4. Set article size to Momentum — this tells us how influential an article is according to citation count adjusted for time

  5. Gently slide the Time Adjustment slider forward to discover the most recent trailblazers in your field

In the video below, we explore influential articles by setting the x-axis to momentum and seeing how articles shift around as we adjust for time.

Remove outliers from your map

If you find your visualisation is skewed by outliers, know that you can remove an article from the map anytime (without losing it from your collection!).

Outliers happen naturally. For example, in the video below, sorting by momentum naturally leads to one dramatic outlier because it has 16,000+ citations, which is much more than all the other papers in the collection.

To remove an outlier from the map:

  1. Click on the paper

  2. Delete it by:

    1. Clicking the first icon, “Remove from map”

    2. Hit backspace

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