See Your Research Impact this Year
As 2024 draws to a close, it's time to review the impact of your research over this past year, to give better perspective for what to tackle next year.
A PhD student recently confided in me how stressed they were, despite a holiday break drawing near.
“It just weighs on me,” she said. And I’m sure she’s not alone.
This feeling of drowning in work is pervasive, and rarely abates for many researchers, regardless of where you are in your career, or whether you’re approaching a holiday break or not.
But as 2024 comes to an end, it’s the perfect time to take a break from thinking about what you didn’t yet do, to really appreciating all you did do over the last calendar year.
We cover two unique ways to review your work (using Litmaps and ChatGPT) to help you see your research with a new perspective. By reviewing your work from a bird’s-eye perspective, you can feel a sense of renewed motivation for 2025.
Here are two ways to review your research, using Litmaps and ChatGPT.
See your research impact with Litmaps
You can clearly visualize your research impact in 2024 by using visual literature maps of your work. By viewing recent work based on your publications, you can directly observe the research your work supported.
You can review the real-time impact of your work using Litmaps, our online literature mapping and discovery tool. Litmaps helps you discover literature and manage your literature review process, as well as visualize research and share ideas.
Here’s how to use Litmaps to review your research impact:
Create a Litmap with your existing publications
Run Explore to discover new papers connected to your work.
Use the Date Filter to get papers published in 2024, to see your recent influence
Review the suggested articles
Add related articles to your map (use “More Like This”) and explore second-degree connections—works that don’t cite you directly but build on your ideas.
I performed this example review on Lina Quan, a professor of Chemistry at Virginia Tech.
The Litmap below shows her work (pulled down from Scopus) in orange. The white circles at the bottom right are relevant, connected articles published in 2024 from Q1 high-impact journals that rely on her work. In total, Litmaps found 27 high-impact articles published in 2024 that relied on Quan’s work.
After reviewing these articles, I saved the suggested articles which connect to her work with the Tag “Quan Impact”.
The result is the Litmap below, where we can clearly see the dozens of articles published in 2024 that are highly connected to Quan’s research.
This type of review can help you to understand the impact a researcher (or even a whole group) has on their field.
If you’re still early on your research journey, this method can be adjusted to work for poster presentations or other works. You can create custom articles in Litmaps (for posters, unpublished work, recently submitted papers, etc.), and add any relevant citations and references to them manually.
What does your Map look like?
Reset your research mindset with ChatGPT
If you’re using the New Year as a time to set resolutions for your work, then consider using ChatGPT to help guide you.
When given the right data and information, we can use ChatGPT like a simulated career coach, asking it to help us meet our goals and find the issues we’ve overlooked in our own work.
Here’s how to use ChatGPT for resolution setting:
Share a summary of your 2024 work with ChatGPT (e.g. “I submitted 2 papers, attended 3 conferences, etc.)
Share any digital sources with ChatGPT (e.g. papers, notes, etc.)
Tell it your 2025 goals ("Publish 3 papers and secure funding for a new project.")
Ask for actionable advice and feedback. For example, use prompts like:
“Give me ten concrete steps I can take the first month of 2025 to set up my entire year for success to achieve my goals.”
“Give me 3 tasks per week for each week in January 2025.”
“Based on everything I told you, what do you think are my biggest blockers to meeting my goals and my biggest opportunities for growth?”
The more specific details you provide, the better you can leverage its ability to help understand your approach to research and thus advise you on what you may change to improve. If your case is vague, it’ll provide equally generic advice.
Doing this myself, I found some excellent advice from ChatGPT. It pointed out where I was wasting too much time and what inhibited me from reaching my goals.
Tip: Ask for actionable, concrete advice you can take now. Below is an example output.
As 2024 comes to an end, we all begin to reflect on our year. Too often, we’re worried about what we don’t accomplish, which is why it becomes essential to review what we did do, to provide ourselves a mental reset and reinstantiate our creativity.
What are your reflections on the research you’ve done this year?
Share with us in the comments below. 👇
At the least, we’re convinced you have been an industrious researcher because the Litmaps community has collectively made over 2 million Litmaps this year!
Thank you for being a part of the Litmaps community, and we look forward to continuing to support your research in 2025.
As AI continues to reshape the academic landscape, ensuring you stay one step ahead is essential. Join the Academic Language Experts’ upcoming free course: AI Tools Boot Camp for Researchers: Core Essentials.
This course offers practical, hands-on training with AI tools to help streamline your literature review, conduct research more efficiently, and write and edit your papers.
this is so relatable!
L'acceptation de la contraception chez les enfants et jeunes filles dans le septième arrondissement de N'djamena : une analyse socio-sanitaire à partir des enjeux et facteurs. Présentez moi les qui parlent de ce titre.