Comment by axtonpitt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by axtonpitt | Hacker News Reader

Hi I'm one of the founders of Litmaps. We set out to build this tool after frustration with the state of current academic search software. This was specifically from the painful literature review process of my co-founder during his PhD.

Our first attempt to solve this was with a "map of all science" (from 1400-today, 100M+ articles, 1B citations), which we did build but it didn't end up solving the problem that well. We re-approached the problem by pairing a time-based citation visualization, with helpful search tools, and project (or map) state. Our visualization lets you quickly see how search results relate to each other (optionally with nodes sized by citation count). We currently have keyword search, and a network search (called Explore) that scans for highly connected articles up to two degrees away from your map(s) and/or keyword searches. Lastly the project state is nice because as you build up key articles, network search is more targeted, and you can opt into email updates if there are any newly published works that connect to your map as we update our dataset.

It's currently in early access so it's free to use, and you don't need to create an account to get started. You can dive right in and start finding relevant articles to what you are working on or are interested in. Keen to hear feedback on our work so far. Thanks.

That looks really great! In my attempt to do something similar ( https://github.com/drewbuschhorn/DoctorMoon ) I kept having issues from the various publisher's apis not playing nice with each other. How are you guys shimming around that for general science?

Have you considered flagging paths for publications that get retracted? I've always thought that a 'this paper you're using has three retracted parent papers,' would be valuable.

Excited to see where you guys go with this!

This is brilliant work. I've been playing with this for the last half hour and have found cool papers that I otherwise wouldn't have. To me, this has a great edge over google scholar and lens.

A wishlist:

1) To be able to share maps with fellow researchers, not as pdfs or bib files, but as a url to the map so that they can interact with it. I can see that a "share link" is possible for an article, but not for a custom map. Such a link could also be used to embed such maps on sites like how one can with plots from https://ourworldindata.org/

2) To be able to get more metadata like sponsor, country, etc. like https://www.lens.org does.

3) To be able to upload pdfs and annotate them. I can see why this is dicey, but if possible, would be great to see an integration with something like https://fermatslibrary.com/margins

> It's currently in early access so it's free to use, and you don't need to create an account to get started.

I know software developers need to eat and totally respect your choice in making it a paid service in the future, but I will confess a deep desire for such a thing to be affordable, if not free.

Just had a quick play around with it and it is really well executed and quite a useful tool. I'm recommending it to my academic and research friends. Hats off to you and the team.

Thanks a lot, will pass on the feedback.

I like it and can see myself using it a lot. Looking forward to trying it with my whole collection rather than individual papers, though I also expect this will bring my computer to a screeching halt XD

One gripe: when asked for a paper title, I tried submitting a DOI link instead and it failed dismally. You could probably reduce server load for title lookup by allowing this as an alternative.

Also, I would like some sort of visual indicator to distinguish between works-cited-by a paper and works-which-cite the same paper. Just glancing at the map, it's not that obvious which is which from color or shape and they're mixed up in the default listing. When I find an interesting paper I often want to dig into its antecedents first and look at its influence afterward, but I don't see a clear visual representation of temporality here.

I'm out and about on mobile at the moment, so can't check in detail. But I just wanted to say thank god you're doing this. Academia is desperately in need of (r)evolution in many areas.

Thanks for the kind words, we'll hopefully have a mobile version one day soon.

I love being able to explore citation graphs this way. I tried creating a couple of maps from recently published seed articles (from Pubmed, if it matters) and found that only 50–60% of the cited works showed up in the map. I assume this reflects incompleteness of the underlying public citation data? Is there any way users can help fill in the gaps?

Mind maps maniac here, super helpful tool! The user experience is delightful. Thanks and best of luck with all. You have new user.

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