AI TOOLS

How I Use Litmaps For Literature Reviews

And get them done fast

Dr. Fox, The AI Academic, finished his work already, and now just wasting time, to his colleague’s chagrin. Image credit: Author, generated with leonardo.ai

In the last post I showed you 2 powerful AI tools to help you drag yourself out of the tar pit of thesis procrastination.

Still Haven’t Started Your Thesis? Here are 2 AI Tools to Help You Start

In this post I’ll show you how and why to use Litmaps to take a leap into the murky depths of in-depth literature reviews.

Remember Connected Papers?

Want Your Literature Review Done In A Day? Try This AI Tool.

Connected Papers is great for getting a basic sense of important papers on a topic. But what if you need to do a more exhaustive search?

This is where Litmaps can help.

Like Connect Papers, it fits into the broad category of Research Citation-Network-Mapper-Visualisation-Wizard-Tools.

But unlike Connected Papers, it lets you dive a little deeper.

So, goggles on…🥽

Litmaps

Key Value: Rapidly conduct exhaustive literature searches

Screenshot of the landing page of litmaps.com. Image credit: Author.

As you can see, Litmaps has 3 main functions:

1. Seed Maps
2. Discover
3. Visualize

1. Seed Maps: Plant a seed, get a map.

Seed Maps shows you topically relevant research related to a single paper.

A “seed” is any article, either one you’ve searched for in Litmaps(handy), one you’ve uploaded into Litmaps (also handy), or one you’ve saved previously on Litmaps (not likely if you’re new to the thing).

Screenshot of the Seed Maps feature search bar on litmaps.com. Image credit: Author.

From this seed paper Litmaps will produce a literature map — a Litmap, if you will — of the most relevant citations and references.

Screenshot of the network graph generated in Seed Maps on litmaps.com. Image credit: Author.

Due to the fundamental nature of time, papers with publishing dates after the date of the seed paper are the papers that have cited the seed paper, and papers with earlier dates are the papers cited by the seed paper (its references).

…Yeah, that took me a while to figure out… 🙃

Anyway, you can move the dots around however you want, the bigger the dot the more citations, and if you already have a paper saved somewhere it’ll show up green so you can discover all the back-alley dealings between your different research fields.

That’s a great start, but we didn’t put goggles on to go splashing in puddles — we want to go deeeeper…🐋

2. Discover: Find the far reaches of research

Discover gives you a very fast way to do an exhaustive literature search.

Screenshot of the Discover feature landing on litmaps.com. Image credit: Author.

Again: search, upload or pull papers from saved, and this time they go in as “inputs” (Litmaps recommends a minimum of 5).

From the inputs, Litmaps stretches out its many tentacles and finds all the most important articles 🐙

To go really deep, you can set Litmaps to also include 2nd degree papers — papers that cite papers that cite your papers (or references of their references).

You can then select the papers you think are most relevant, add those as additional inputs and then run the whole thing again, leading to even more relevant papers

Screenshot of the network graph generated in the Discover feature on litmaps.com. Image credit: Author.

You can do this to your little literature-hunting-heart’s content, and rest assured you’ve exhausted the literature on that topic 😮‍💨

But just having a heap of papers doesn’t really allow for deep insights.For that we need to…

Visualize: See how everything is connected.

Visualize gives you a visual tool to better understand the relationships between papers.

Screenshot of the Maps feature landing on litmaps.com. Image credit: Author.

Basically the Seed Maps feature with an exhaustive collection of papers instead of just a Seed.

Screenshot of the network graph generated in the Maps feature on litmaps.com. Image credit: Author.

The really valuable part is that you can move the maps around as you wish, helping you build up an intuition of how different lines of research have progressed and how they’re related.

That’s much better than just doing a literature review, finding the papers once, then promptly forgetting most of the papers because you never saw the bigger picture in how they’re all connected.

You can also add some articles to your map that you suspect might have some obscure connections, or just see how two major areas of research are connected.

Better still, if you’re not 100% confident that you’ve found everything you need, or you’re working in a field that is currently pumping out a lot of important new research (let’s hope so), then Litmaps can keep an eye out for you.

Its Monitor This Search feature will, unsurprisingly, monitor the search for you — running the same search everyday to check for new papers, which they’ll email to you.

Screenshot of the “Monitor” button on litmaps.com. Image credit: Author

To do this, click the Save button at the top of the screen once you’ve finished and then hit the Monitor button next to that search under Saved Searches on the Discover page.

The Catch:

Pretty much all of these features are only available with Litmaps Pro.

Without it, you don’t have access to Advanced Search, and without Advanced Search you can only really play in the shallows.

The Pro version is $50 a month — steep 🏔️

BUT, if you have a university email (which is highly likely if you’re reading this newsletter), then you can get it for $12.50 per month, or $120/year if you pay for a full year.

Screenshot of the Upgrade options page on litmaps.com. Image credit: Author

If you don’t have a university email, or you just don’t like spending money, then maybe it’s time to tumble down the rabbit hole…🐇

I’ve decided to keep all my writing on medium free of paywalls. So if you like my writing and want to help me write more, you can buy me a coffee, subscribe, or hire me via Upwork or email: kiall.hildred@gmail.com