Citation mapping uses a more visual approach to find papers through a network of citations and citation analysis between scholarly articles. It helps you identify key publications and authors, and understand the trends of a research field even if there is no direct citation between the articles.
These AI-powered literature mapping tools use the citation chaining (or chasing) mechanism by mining the references and citations starting from a single or set of "seed" papers. While keywords search is the usual practice for literature searching, understanding the keywords and developing your search strings might get a little tricky. Some articles might not always have the keywords and search terms you use. Thus, it will be also useful to mine the references and citations to retrieve similar papers on your research topic.
Image credit: The AI Tools for Research and Study guide includes content from Literature Discovery through Citation Chaining and Mapping, by Aster Zhao, of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology licensed under a CC BY 4.0
Below are some of the AI-powered literature mapping tools. Note that this is a work in progress. More tools will be added soon.
| Tools | Access | Data Source | Cost | Literature Searching | Input | Key Output | Literature Analysis / Answer Generation | Integration with Reference Management Software | Map Sharing |
| Connected Papers | Account sign-up is encouraged | Semantic Scholar | 5 free maps per month; all features included; cost involved | Similarity (co-citation and bibliographic coupling) |
One or a set of seed papers (search by title, DOI, URL) A research topic (search by keywords) |
Visual map of related works Prior works Derivative works |
No | Import/export RIS. files | By URL or email |
| LitMaps | Account sign-up is encouraged |
Semantic Scholar, Crossref, OpenAlex, PubMed, ArXiv |
2 free maps at a time; 100 articles per map; Up to 20 basic search | Similarity (co-citation and bibliographic coupling) |
One or a set of seed papers (search by title, DOI, URL) A research topic (search by keywords) |
Visual map of related works (on a timeline) |
No | Import/export RIS. files | By URL or email |
| Researchrabbit | Account sign-up is encouraged |
Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex |
"Forever free for researchers" | Similarity (co-citation and bibliographic coupling) |
One or a set of seed papers (search by title, DOI, URL) A research topic (search by keywords) |
Visual map of related works Similar Work Earlier Work Later Work These authors Suggested authors |
No | Sync with Zotero and import/export RIS. files | By URL or email |
The AI Tools for Research and Study guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Credits:
The AI Tools for Research and Study guide includes content from Literature Discovery through Citation Chaining and Mapping, by Aster Zhao, of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology licensed under a CC BY 4.0
