The all-new Litmaps

An Open Letter to the Research Community

Today is a significant day for Litmaps.

We are releasing a revamped Litmaps application and dataset. The updates are the culmination of all we've learned in the past six months from our user base of more than 125K researchers all over the world.

Since our last release, we have been on a journey to refine our service, and learn how we fit into the tools in the scientific literature ecosystem. I'm grateful to our investors and supporters who encouraged us and supported us along the way. Litmaps exists to accelerate scientific breakthroughs, and we are doing that by helping scientists discover papers they might have missed, and make sense of how the scientific literature fits together with visualization.

At its core, Litmaps is a Literature Discovery Tool. It helps researchers find academic papers they didn’t know they needed to know about. I believe Litmaps does this better than any other tool available today, and we will continue to invest in the service to ensure we stay ahead in the Discovery game. Discovery is in our DNA.

The ability to provide great paper recommendations fits into the research ecosystem between Reference Managers like Zotero and Mendeley, and Literature Search Tools like OA.mg in the Open Access space, and like Elicit in the AI search space. Litmaps has the potential to add significant value to both. By integrating and partnering with the best Reference Managers and Search Tools, we can create new and unique value for researchers, and most importantly the result is greater than the sum of its parts. Understanding where we fit, and how we create value for others in the ecosystem has been a key part of the journey.

Over the last 6 months we’ve spent a great deal of time understanding how our customers use Litmaps as a way of telling their research story, which has led us to introduce a few UX changes today. We’ve separated Discovery (the process of finding papers) from the process of Visualizing the relationships between papers in a given collection. This means that a Litmap can stop trying to do Discovery and Visualization tasks at once, and can focus on being a groundbreaking science communication and storytelling tool in its own right. 

We believe there’s huge power in the story-telling potential of Litmaps and we’re keen to share your literature reviews with the world through a Litmap.

As part of the updates to Litmaps we've introduced monitored searches, which has the potential to deliver critical value to you. Staying ahead of the research curve is super hard, and can be a full time job in its own right. You can now set up and save searches which Litmaps will monitor in the background for you every day. As new articles are published that match the search, Litmaps will send you specific and refined alerts which will help you focus on actual research, not researching research!

To deliver Litmaps to you, we’ve updated our pricing plans to adjust to our new user experience. Making Litmaps available as broadly as possible remains a key pillar of our mission, so we’re maintaining a free plan, albeit with slightly different usage constraints. You can see the new plans here (litmaps.com/pricing)

Another big part of our service is the data itself. We have spent a significant amount of time and energy refining our data pipelines and processes to improve the quality of the metadata in Litmaps. We can also announce today that we have added the metadata from OpenAlex to our platform. This is combined with our existing dataset from Semantic Scholar and Crossref, expanding our dataset significantly. In the future we will be adding support for custom data, which will allow you to add your own thesis to your Litmap as an example, and data patch requests, where you can notify us of improvements to the dataset so it keeps getting better.

I’ll keep you up to date on our progress in the coming months, but in the meantime I invite you to jump in, create some Litmaps, and please let me know what you think!

Axton Pitt
Litmaps Co-founder and CEO