Litmaps at a glance

Starting price: $40/mo (Pro Commercial)
Free plan: Yes
Platforms: Web

What is Litmaps?

Litmaps turns a set of seed papers into an interactive citation map showing how a field connects, then keeps working after the initial search: saved maps monitor the literature and alert you when relevant new papers appear, which is the difference between a one-off discovery tool and something that stays useful across a multi-year project. It draws on a very large citation database and is used by researchers, students and policy analysts.

Two things to weigh. Maps are only as good as the seeds, so a poorly chosen starting set produces a confidently drawn map of the wrong literature; start from papers you already know are central. And a free plan exists with paid tiers lifting map and monitoring limits, so heavy users running several projects at once should budget for an upgrade rather than assuming the free allowance covers a full review.

Key Features

Visual Citation Map Builder270M+ Paper DatabaseOpenAlex and Semantic Scholar IntegrationSeed Paper DiscoveryDiscover Automated Search FeatureWeekly Email Monitoring AlertsCustomizable Map AxesPublication Date and Citation Count MappingMulti-Seed Map CombinationZotero Export and SyncTeam Collaboration ModeProject Sharing and ExportingSemantic Search Algorithm OptionInfluential Paper HighlightingMap Download as ImageEducation License 75% OffCountry-Based Parity Pricing

How to Use Litmaps

1Sign up at litmaps.com and create a new project

2Search for a topic or paste a paper title or DOI to set your seed

3Review the visual citation map with papers plotted by date and citation count

4Use Discover to find additional relevant papers outside your seed's citation network

5Enable weekly alerts to receive email updates when new related papers are published

Who is Litmaps for?

✅ Best For

PhD students and academic researchers mapping a new field who want a richer, more customizable visual alternative to Connected Papers, with map axis controls, multi-seed combination, and automatic monitoring alerts.
Research teams at universities and institutions who need to collaborate on shared literature maps, export to Zotero, and keep their literature review automatically updated as new papers are published.
Policy analysts and science librarians who need to visualize and communicate a field's research landscape to non-specialist stakeholders, using Litmaps' shareable, downloadable map figures.

❌ Not For

Researchers who need AI-generated written summaries, data extraction tables, or systematic review automation alongside their paper discovery, as Litmaps focuses exclusively on visual citation mapping and does not include document reading or synthesis tools.
Users looking for a completely free, no-limits tool, since Litmaps' free plan restricts you to 20 inputs and 2 maps with 100 articles each, and meaningful advanced use requires the paid Pro plan.

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Pricing

Is Litmaps free? Yes, there is a free plan. Paid plans start at $40/mo (Pro Commercial).

Free$0

✓Up to 20 inputs
✓2 maps
✓100 articles per map

Pro Commercial$40/mo

✓Unlimited inputs
✓unlimited articles
✓all features
✓monitoring alerts

Pro Education75% off commercial

✓For students and academics with valid institutional affiliation

TeamCustom

✓Team-wide Pro access
✓collaboration features
✓shared projects

Prompts to Try

Build a citation map from this foundational paper on attention mechanisms

Show me the most cited recent papers related to my seed paper on urban microplastics

Combine maps from three seed papers to find the intersection of machine learning and climate modeling

Use Cases

A material science PhD student adds her three most important foundational papers as seeds in Litmaps and within minutes has a visual map of 60 connected studies sorted by recent citation count, helping her identify the five papers every researcher in her field keeps citing that she had not yet read.

A research team lead sets up weekly monitoring alerts on their lab's core Litmap so every team member receives an email the moment a new relevant paper is published, replacing their manual weekly PubMed screening routine and saving the group four hours per week.

A science policy analyst at a government ministry uses Litmaps to generate a shareable citation map of climate adaptation research for a briefing document, presenting the research landscape visually to ministers who are not familiar with academic literature navigation.

A postdoc combines three separate Litmaps on gut microbiome, depression, and diet into a multi-origin map, revealing a dense cluster of papers at the intersection that she had not encountered when searching each topic independently.

A professor uses Litmaps in a graduate seminar to show students how a single 1998 foundational paper on protein folding spawned an entire field, using the live visual map to guide a discussion about scientific influence and citation networks.