Litmaps 2023

We've just made some huge changes to Litmaps we've very excited about... They're so big that we wanted to give you a quick walk-through of what's been going on.

Design

Anyone who's seen the latest version of Litmaps will realise there have been some huge design changes. If you haven't yet, check them out! I'll write more in depth about these soon, but for now here's what you need to know:

You're able to do everything you used to be able to do!*

  • Your maps have been transferred into "Collections". Collections are the new way of... collecting... articles within Litmaps.
  • You're still able to visualise your research in the Maps section.
  • You're still able to explore your articles' top citations in the Discover section.

*there's one exception here – Notes. Notes were a feature which was central to our previous design ideology, but saw very little uptake. We still have our eyes on Notes as something to bring back into the product, but for now they're a low-priority feature that was taking up too much of our time. You can download any notes you had with us through the Your Library section. (p.s. If you loved Notes and desperately want them back, please let us know!)

Data

We now index the OpenAlex data source, in addition to our previous vendors Semantic Scholar, CrossRef (and splashes of arXiv!). Additionally, we've refined our data processes so that duplicate article records should show up much, much less frequently.

We also have started indexing data on a daily basis! The results you see in Litmaps should be super fresh! This also has some pretty massive effects for how effective Monitored Searches (a la. Email Alerts) are – we're excited to chat more about this in future.

I'd like to leave a gentle reminder that although we're indexing data every day, not all of our third party data providers release updates on a daily basis. So we are subject to bottlenecks in some cases.

Enjoy!

That'll do for now. As mentioned, I'm planning on explaining the design changes in more detail later on – we just couldn't wait to get this release into your hands!

Best wishes from the Litmaps team,
Digl, Axton, Gayani, Sam

Share your research with the world

We’re looking to promote high-quality literature maps that can help other researchers, and the wider public, better-understand a broad range of research topics.

If you've been working on a research project, literature review, or have critical thoughts on the research process, we'd love to hear from you.

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