Litmaps
FreemiumVisual citation mapping tool for literature discovery that builds interactive, auto-updating paper maps from seed articles with 270M+ academic papers.
What is Litmaps?
Litmaps is a literature discovery platform trusted by over 300,000 researchers, students, and policy makers that transforms how academics explore academic literature through dynamic, interactive citation maps. Users start with one or more seed papers and Litmaps builds a visual map of the most connected and relevant articles, plotted by publication date on the x-axis and citation count on the y-axis, so the most influential recent papers naturally rise to the top right of the map. The platform draws from OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and Crossref to cover over 270 million academic papers across all disciplines. Litmaps' Discover feature runs automated searches to surface papers researchers may not have thought to look for, and its weekly monitoring alerts notify users by email when new relevant papers are published in their area. Maps can be customized by changing the axes to sort by references, citations, or connectivity, and projects can be shared with collaborators or exported to reference managers like Zotero. An Education License offers 75% off commercial pricing for students and academics, and country-based parity pricing makes it accessible globally.
Key Features
How to Use Litmaps
✅ 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
- ✓Up to 20 inputs
- ✓2 maps
- ✓100 articles per map
- ✓Unlimited inputs
- ✓unlimited articles
- ✓all features
- ✓monitoring alerts
- ✓For students and academics with valid institutional affiliation
- ✓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