Guides & Tutorials: Harnessing GenAI in Your Academic Journey: Literature Mapping Tools

Understanding existing research is crucial for identifying gaps and trends. The following tools can assist researchers with more advanced needs in visualizing and mapping the relationships between different papers, making it easier to navigate complex research fields successfully.

Connected Papers
You can use Connected Papers to:
• Get a visual overview of a new academic field
• Make sure you haven't missed an important paper
• Create the bibliography for your thesis
• Discover the most relevant prior and derivative works
Litmaps
It is an innovative research tool which helps users visualize and track academic literature. Litmaps has integrated LibKey to enable users to access the full text indexed in their service. Click "Help Guide" to learn how to access an article's PDF by connecting Litmaps to PolyU with LibKey.
You can use Litmaps to:
• Find relevant research faster
• Discover research gaps
• Manage your entire literature review with ease
Open Knowledge Maps
It is a free online tool that can generate a knowledge map of a research topic. It shows the main areas in a field with relevant papers and concepts. They are building an AI-based visual interface that dramatically increases the visibility of research findings for science and society alike.
ResearchRabbit
It is a discovery app which unlocks a completely novel way to search for papers and authors, monitor new literature, visualize research landscapes, and collaborate with colleagues.

For more tools, quick overviews and a comparison of such tools, you may refer to the following link:

List of literature mapping tools
A list of AI tools specializes in visualizing connections between papers through citaiton networks for literature discovery. A brief comparison and overviews of the tools are included.

By Aaron Tay, Singapore Management University Libraries