Staying up to date with current research can be demanding and taxing on one’s time. Periodically checking in with recent releases of journals, conferences, etc. is tedious, but is also vital in order to not miss any publications that may impact your research. This is where the Litmaps Monitor tool comes in.
You’ll receive weekly updates for any new papers related to your research topic or question. Monitor works by routinely checking changes for an existing search you’ve created. It’s like having an assistant that will automatically check in with you when something new comes up that might be connected to your research.
In this guide, we'll walk you through how to set up Litmaps Monitor so you’ll receive weekly updates with new, relevant research right to your inbox.
What is Litmaps Monitored Search?
Monitored Search is a feature that our online tool, Discover, offers. If you’re not yet familiar with Discover, check out our guide here to learn how it helps you to grow your research library.
Discover takes a starting set of papers and searches for new ones based on their connections via the citation network. It’s designed to recommend papers that can help you grow your literature library, find sources for a literature review, or even identify gaps in your research. However, a one-time search may not be enough for your problem. Monitor is an additional layer of functionality built into Discover that keeps your search alive.
Litmaps Monitor re-runs your existing search for you on a weekly basis, alerting you of any new papers it finds. Your search is defined as the input papers and any configurations you’ve set (perhaps a particular keyword). Monitored searches can be disabled or adjusted, based on how your research needs change over time.
Why use Litmaps Monitor?
Discovering new papers isn’t always a one-time task. New publications are coming out all the time — about two every minute. However, it isn’t easy to stay up to date on recent releases within a particular field. It requires dedicated time to search through databases, journals, conferences, etc. Litmaps aims to save you time by routinely rerunning your saved searches to look for any recent releases that are related.
Once you’ve set up a search using Discover, Litmaps can automatically rerun it for you on a weekly basis, alerting you of any new papers it finds. By monitoring searches, you can get new, relevant papers right to your inbox.
How to get new papers right to your inbox
Here, we’ll go over the steps to follow in order to get periodic email updates about any newly-released articles related to your topic. We’ll start by searching for new papers using Litmaps Discover, which traverses the citation network to help you find relevant literature. If you’re still new to Litmaps, then check out our guide here on how to use Discover. Once we have a Discover search set up, we’ll then enable Litmaps Monitor in order to get emails with any new papers that meet the search criteria.
First, let’s set up a Discover Search
Before being able to monitor for new papers, we need to first set up a search that Litmaps can run for us. We’ll do this using the Litmaps Discover app, which look through the citations of a starting set of papers to find related research.
If you haven’t yet used Discover to search for new papers, check out our guide here
To set up a Discover search:
Go to Litmaps Discover in our online app
Set up and run a new search
Follow the steps here if you’re new to this
Save the Search
Click “Save Search” at the top
Give your Search a name
Now, let’s monitor the search
By now, you’ve searched for papers using the Discover tool. In order to get automatic updates on new papers that are related to this search, you just need to enable monitoring.
To set up a monitored search:
Click “Monitor” at the top of the page
It’s that easy!
You can also adjust an existing search before you start monitoring. Perhaps you’d like to add a paper or two, or change the configuration filters. To edit the search before monitoring, just follow these steps:
Add any final papers you’d like to have in your Search. To add more papers:
Click on the paper in the sidebar
Hit the plus
When you’re done, hit “Finish” at the bottom
Click “Monitor this Search”
How to edit or cancel a monitored search?
You can cancel a monitoring update any time by just going to Litmaps Discover. From there, you can manage all your monitored searches — updating, disabling, enabling, and deleting them.
First, we need to locate our list of searches:
Go to Litmaps Discover in our online app
Find the search you’d like to edit in the list of Saved Searches
From here, you can disable the alert, reenable it, update the search, or delete it altogether. We’ll go over how to do each of these below.
To disable a monitored search
Go to the search following the steps above
Click on the green button labeled “Monitored”
Click “Stop Monitoring” in the dialogue that pops up
You can reenable monitoring anytime by pressing the “Monitor” button for the search.
How to delete a monitored search
Find the search you’d like to cancel in the list of Saved Searches
Click on the name of the search
Press on the three dots at the top of the page
Click “Delete”
Confirm “Delete” in the dialogue
