Litmaps Community Highlight: Research Stories
From undergraduates doing their first-ever literature review, to seasoned PhD Candidates wrapping up their theses, here's how researchers are using Litmaps today.
The last time you were on Litmaps, did you wonder who else was there too? Who else was clicking the same button as you, but just sitting on the opposite side of the world?
Students, academics, professionals and users with titles we can hardly imagine use Litmaps. With researchers at thousands of different universities, institutions and companies across the world, it’s hard to capture the diversity of research conducted by our users.
But, we can still try!
Here, we showcase two users who have found Litmaps essential to their work. My hope is that this can give you new ideas on how to approach your own research.
Whether you’re an undergraduate student starting your first literature review, or a senior professor reviewing your life’s work, I hope Litmaps can help you in your research journey.
Debika is a Professor of Business at Southwestern University who researches the impact of technological innovations on marketing strategy. She teaches a seminar for first year students at SU, designed to prepare them for the research they’ll need to do during their degree.
Debika is passionate about having students see how ideas in research connect, and to understand scholarly networks. Litmaps is central to her teaching strategy, providing a platform with which to clearly teach fundamental research concepts like seeing how literature connects, identifying key authors or concepts, and seeing the research in different ways (by citations/references, author, or semantic similarity; the algorithm options).
She use Litmaps as a teaching aid to help make research less intimidating. She also feels that equipping students with expertise in an advanced tool like Litmaps provides them a critical skill for the rest of their academic journey. Her seminar students even chose to include visual Litmaps demonstrating their work in their final presentations at their first symposium, on topics as varied as The Desire to be Scared While Watching Movies to ACL Reconstruction.
If you’d like to use Litmaps with your class, you can sign up as a Team or reach out to us for assistance. See our classroom resources here.
Tyler Smith is a graduate student at the University of Ottawa and is in the final stretch of his PhD. Over the last five years, he’s been studying immune cell metabolism in contexts such as bacterial infection and heart disease. He’s spent countless hours running experiments, culturing and infecting primary immune cells with pathogens like Salmonella, to understand how metabolic pathways impact disease progression.
During experimental days, he’ll cram in as much reading as he can, and often uses Litmaps to quickly dive into topics. He finds Litmaps especially useful for exploring new topics outside his comfort zone. He’ll throw in a few key papers he knows, and start iteratively searching using the More like this feature, and “just keep hitting refresh!”
Tyler also tries to keep his search as focused as possible, and will often use the keyword filter to specify the particular protein he’s interested in at the moment.
As is the case for most graduate students, Tyler is excited to take the next steps in his research journey and to finally wrap up his PhD. Having run hundreds of experiments already, he recognizes the challenge in deciding “what is the end of this story and the beginning of the next story?”
We absolutely love hearing about how you use Litmaps. That’s why this isn’t even the first time we’ve done a letter like this (see our last one here).
If you find Litmaps useful and would like to share your story, get in touch with us. We’re eager to hear what you have to share.
Message us with the text “Here’s my research story…” and we’ll reach out to feature you in our future newsletters.
I would like to thank Debika and Tyler for their essential contributions to this edition of The Scoop.
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