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Search Algorithms in Litmaps
Search Algorithms in Litmaps

Here's how Litmaps searches and recommends articles. Plus, how you can customize your search for best results.

Marina Kisley avatar
Written by Marina Kisley
Updated this week

Litmaps provides comprehensive and customizable search algorithms, letting you efficiently search through the scientific literature on your topic.

How does Litmaps Work?

Litmaps finds relevant research on your topic by using the citation network.

To get started, create a Litmap for one or more starting articles. Then review the relevant, suggested literature to find articles you didn't know about.

You can customize your search using different filters or algorithms to narrow down your search and find literature on your topic even faster.

How to use Litmaps Search?

Click here to learn on how to use the Litmaps search, including how to change your algorithm or use advanced search features.

Litmaps Search Algorithms

Litmaps has three search algorithms you can choose from:

  • Shared Citations & References (default)

  • Common Authors

  • Similar Text

After creating a Litmap, you can update the search algorithm or add search filters.

Shared Citations & References

Litmaps finds results with the most connected literature to your input article(s).

For a single input article, Litmaps returns the most inter-connected articles from among your paper's citations, references and co-citations (co-citations are all the citations of the references). For multiple inputs, Litmaps returns the most inter-connected articles from among all the inputted papers citations and references.

β†’ Use Shared Citations & References to find all relevant articles on your work, and to find articles you may overlook using traditional keyword search.

Common Authors

Litmaps analyzes your inputs and identifies the most common author collaborations and returns other articles also published by those author collaborations.

β†’ Use Common Authors to understand the key authors and research teams in your field and find their other work.

Similar Text

Litmaps uses AI-driven semantic analysis on the titles and abstracts of your inputs to find articles with similar content. This is the only algorithm that does not use citations/references in calculating recommendations.

β†’ Use Similar Text to find papers that may have fewer citations or are from places you wouldn't normally check.

πŸ€” Not what you're looking for?

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