Litmaps

Start your next literature deep‑dive by sketching a live map of the field. Drop in a title, DOI, or even a paragraph from your draft, and watch a visual network of related papers appear. Pan through the network to trace ideas upstream to foundational work and downstream to newer spin‑offs. Use filters for year or venue to narrow the view, then pin the must‑reads to a shortlist. One session is enough to replace hours of manual tab‑opening and copy‑pasting across databases.

Writing a review section? Build one map per subtopic—methods, population, or application—then merge them to reveal overlaps and the few papers that bridge areas. That intersection is your argument’s backbone. Export the selected set to your reference manager (RIS or BibTeX) so citations flow straight into Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote. When you need figures, render a clean overview image of the landscape and drop it into your manuscript, slide deck, or preprint without redrawing it by hand.

Planning a grant, thesis, or a new course? Use maps to scope the terrain and defend choices. Compare a proposal’s theme against an adjacent area to confirm novelty, identify collaborators, or spot prior art. For teaching, share a public link to a trimmed map so students can explore the core readings and see how seminal works connect. It’s a fast way to turn a static reading list into a navigable story of the field. more