Literature Review with Litmaps, July 2024 Webinar

Litmaps positions literature review as a structured, visualization-driven workflow for finding the most relevant papers fast—then staying organized and expanding coverage without getting buried in thousands of results. The core idea is to start with a clear research question, identify one strong “starting paper,” and use Litmaps to generate recommendations based on how papers interconnect through citations and references. Instead of treating search as a keyword lottery, Litmaps turns it into a repeatable strategy that helps researchers prioritize what to read first, especially when entering a new or interdisciplinary field.

The webinar walks through the standard literature review steps—defining the topic, searching for literature, evaluating sources, reading and analyzing, organizing notes, and writing with proper citation—but stresses that these steps often loop rather than follow a straight line. That looping is where researchers typically lose track. Litmaps is presented as a way to prevent that drift by combining three functions: (1) relevant literature discovery, (2) source evaluation support before full reading, and (3) organization using tags plus lightweight citation/export features.

For “simple search” in a brand-new area, the recommended workflow is straightforward: create a workspace for the project, run a quick search by keywords or by selecting a known paper, then click “explore related articles.” Litmaps builds an interactive map where recommended papers are ranked by “top shared citations and references”—meaning the system looks for papers that are highly interconnected with the input paper(s). The visualization is not decorative; it’s used to triage. Node connections help identify papers most linked to the starting set, while the map’s axes (publication date on the x-axis and citation count on the y-axis) and node size (reference count by default) make it easy to spot historically influential work (top-left) versus newer developments (right side). The webinar’s example on forest carbon sequestration and biodiversity illustrates how a highly connected review-like paper (“10 golden rules for reforestation…”) can serve as a launch point for a broader network of related literature.

As researchers move from discovery to management, Litmaps’ tagging system is framed as the practical antidote to overwhelm. Papers can be grouped into subtopics as they’re reviewed, so the growing collection stays navigable and can later support more comprehensive searching.

The second major workflow—“comprehensive searching”—targets the moment when researchers already have a curated library and need to check for what’s missing, including newer work. Litmaps supports this by importing large sets of papers (from files or existing collections), then running recommendation generation across the entire library. Filters help narrow results: date ranges to focus on recent years, keyword filters to target specific terms in titles/abstracts, and algorithm switching when citation networks are sparse. A “monitor” feature adds automation by re-running searches on a schedule (weekly or monthly) as the Litmaps database updates.

Finally, the webinar addresses practical constraints and expectations: Litmaps relies on open-access metadata aggregated from Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, and Crossref (with a corpus reported as 270M+ records, updated weekly). It exports citations/metadata and supports basic citation workflows, while more complex bibliography formatting is better handled by dedicated reference managers. Differences in citation counts across tools are attributed to how citations are calculated and deduplicated. Pricing is split into Free, Pro, Team, and Institutional plans, with Pro enabling advanced inputs/filters and offering performance advantages via a priority queue for computationally heavy searches. A discount code and country-based pricing are also mentioned, along with the note that sanctioned countries may be limited to Free.