Litmaps let's you both find articles on your topic and see how they connect, using visual literature maps. It's the fastest way to dive into the literature on your topic and understand the scientific landscape at the same time.
How to search for articles with Litmaps
Go to the Litmaps app
Click the search bar at the top left
Type in an article you know, or just search for your topic / research question (e.g. "carbon sequestration forest review").
Select one or more of the returned articles that seem relevant to your topic. These will be your starting articles.
Click "Explore Related Articles"
View your suggested articles:
On the Map: your starting articles are the darkened dots, and suggested articles show up as hollow dots
On the sidebar: All suggested articles are listed on the side too
That's all it takes to get started with Litmaps. Simply give Litmaps one or more starting articles, and it will do the heavy-lifting for you of searching through the citation network for the most relevant papers.
Customize your Search
Use Litmaps Pro to focus your search and find the most important papers on your topic quickly. Litmaps has two filters to improve your search results with:
Date Filter
Keyword Filter
Search by Date of Publication
The date filter allows you to quickly find the most recent advances on a field, using any starting paper. Simply create a new Litmap with one or more papers. Then, set the date filter to look for papers published in the last few years.
Search by Specific Keywords
Target your search on your specific niche or sub-topic by using the keyword filter. Litmaps will automatically generate keyword suggestions based on the abstracts and titles of the papers already on your Map.
Keywords make it easy to also spot research gaps. Create a Litmap with papers on a given topic, then use the keyword filter to see if any of them involve a certain method you are exploring in your domain.
Ignore certain articles
To better customize your results, you can also ignore recommendations you don't find useful. Below each recommendation, next to the "More like this" option, you can hit the Ignore icon.
Ignore has two options:
Ignore for now will stop the result from showing on this Litmap
Never recommend this will stop the result from showing on any Litmaps in this Workspace.
Litmaps Quick Search
Litmaps offer two kinds of search. The first is our basic "Quick Search" lookup feature, which you'll use to select starting papers for your Litmap. The second is the actual search algorithms used to recommend articles (those discussed above).
Use the Litmaps "Quick Search" to find starting articles for your Litmap. Litmaps Quick Search uses the Google Scholar search engine by default. If this doesn't find your queried paper, it will then use the Semantic Scholar search engine, followed by the Litmaps search engine.
How to use Quick Search
To look for a specific article in Litmaps, try searching by that article's title or DOI. Either:
Paste the article's DOI, or
Search using the whole title (you can also wrap the title in "quotes" to run an exact match search)
Advanced Search Operators
We use Elasticsearch to power our keyword search engine. We support several advanced search operators:
" … " Match exact phrases – Ideal for title searches
- Exclude the next term
( … ) Group terms
pre* Matches all possibilities after the given prefix
| Logical OR operator
You can also change which search algorithm to use in Quick Search by clicking on the Google Scholar symbol next to the Search button (see the image below).
