Show HN: Litmaps – Visual Research Discovery Tool

https://app.litmaps.co

by axtonpitt • 5 years ago

116 31 5 years ago

app.litmaps.co

xaedes• 5 years ago

Pretty amazing! Is there an option to display the articles in "year - title" instead of "author, year" format?

Imho this would give a much better overview over the topics and research itself.

With "author, year" format it feels like a tool to analyse citation networks and how people cite each other; more about the social aspect than about the content of the articles.

axtonpitt9• 5 years ago

That's a great suggestion, there isn't an option currently but that is reasonably easy to add. One issue is trying to fit enough labels on nodes to make it useful which we have grappled with.

mncharity• 5 years ago

When exploring a seed article, mousing over a node highlights its filtered graph. Perhaps show its title then as well?

And I'd ideally like to also see the abstract then, somewhere. Rather than that requiring a click. Currently, "surfing", orienting exploration, seems regrettably high friction. Click, wait-for-load, look, click, load, look, "hmm, did I click on that one already? yes, drat.", ... "have I clicked on all of them yet? I don't know, maybe I've missed something nifty, but I'm done.". Having faded pink nodes that no longer respond to mouse adds a "ok, to see that node, I currently need to first click on other node".

For node labels, perhaps have some kind of title digest? To visually aid the "remind me again which paper that node is?". Perhaps the title in an unreadably small font?

When "Run Explore" on a map yields "No results", perhaps add an onboarding hint of what needs to be different in order to have results?

Sigh. When using HN, after logging out in a different window, continuing to edit a comment, and clicking "update"... apparently unrecoverably discards the edit?!? :/

Briefly, on the map list of papers, the scrollbar vanishes after a second or two (on desktop firefox), so you lose the visual indication of how far down the list you are. Have to jiggle the list to briefly get that back.

On the map list of papers, clicking on a paper popovers the paper info. To go back, there's a close-X, and history-back works. But ESC doesn't, and perhaps should.

Off topic but for fun, when using a shallow-3D display (eg AR glasses), it seems information might be segregated/decluttered using depth. So for silly example, there might be lots of title clutter, but if it was on a layer raised above the node graph, one might "look through" the clutter to the graph. And then attentionally shift to the title layer, without that depth step being so large as to trigger refocus eye strain. ... Maybe. Just something I've played with. And it's less than pretty.

axtonpitt9• 5 years ago

Just deployed an update to give you an option to change the label to a truncated title. (It's under the top right 'cog' menu on the map).

axtonpitt9• 5 years ago

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.

austinjp• 5 years ago

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.

axtonpitt9• 5 years ago

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

vogon_laureate• 5 years ago

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.

axtonpitt9• 5 years ago

Thanks a lot, will pass on the feedback.

drewbuschhorn• 5 years ago

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!

throwaway888abc• 5 years ago

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

jpeloquin• 5 years ago

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?

anigbrowl• 5 years ago

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.

cableclasper• 5 years ago

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.

Cenk• 5 years ago

I took one look at Litmaps when they first launched on ProductHunt and loved it so much we immediately approached them to integrate it with Citationsy (https://citationsy.com/blog/citationsy-and-litmaps/). The features they have added since then, like email updates if a new paper pops up on your map, colour coding, and reference count, show that the team is on the pulse of what’s useful to researchers and students. Looking forward to seeing what they add next!

Take a look at an example map here: https://app.litmaps.co/maps?doi=10.1038/S42256-019-0086-4

benrbray• 5 years ago

Always glad to see better citation tools! Some feedback about the site:

After clicking through all the links on the top navigation bar as well as some of the links in the footer, and I didn't see anything except for marketing fluff and testimonials.

I was hoping for some screenshots some kind of "features" page, with a section for each major feature of Citationsy, and an in-depth explanation of how it compares to other tools, plus a screenshot of actually using that feature.

Did I miss something? If I did, please make it easier to find out what Citationsy actually does!

I also tried logging in, but your free trial also demands that I enter my credit card info. Big red flag, no thanks.

timvdalen• 5 years ago

Looks interesting! Is there a way to get some more 'debug' output from importing? I tried to import a bibliography I had lying around, but it found 0 articles in it (even though it's valid and has 33 entries).

axtonpitt9• 5 years ago

Sorry not at the moment, will look into this.

stared• 5 years ago

The idea is nice, but the search does not work. I tried to look for my own articles, but failed. It showed instead some other articles that for sure don't contain a given work (e.g. I searched for my surname with a word "multiphoton" and yet it showed me some legal articles).

peytoncasper• 5 years ago

This is really awesome, I love the map for tracking existing papers and exploration for finding relevant ones. Any thoughts of supporting other integrations into something like Notion? Would be awesome to use Litmaps as the central index and attach notes on the papers.

Where are you indexing your articles from? Plenty of ML/CS articles, but wasn't able to find someone by their Orchid ID in the Biology/Chemistry space.

Looking forward to the full release.

axtonpitt9• 5 years ago

Hey there, thanks for the feedback! We have just launched notes and ORCID author search, so hopefully that helps you locate the author you are looking for.

Grimm1• 5 years ago

I'm so happy to see someone made this! I asked for something similar a few months ago and got crickets. I found something from the 90's that surely people had built on and I would have liked to see what had been done since but, manually tracing through everything would have been exhausting.

https://twitter.com/IanTB01/status/1359969167760371720

yellowyacht• 5 years ago

Fantastic! I played with it some and I'm really impressed. Thanks for not requiring an account. What do you plan to do with it next?

teapourer• 5 years ago

Great work! Is there a way to share a map state via a URL?

axtonpitt9• 5 years ago

Not currently, this is on our todo list.

cjlm• 5 years ago

This looks interesting, I've been using Connected Papers [0] which does a really good job. Nice to see an alternative.

[0] https://www.connectedpapers.com/

omarhaneef• 5 years ago

A few thoughts:

1. This is amazing. I wish I had it years ago, and I could use it now.

2. I like the visualization but my favorite thing is the sense of completeness and influence I get when I look at articles. Rather than relying on someone's opinion of the most influential article, I can see the article and the influence right there.

3. This is early days but I am already running into the frustration of not being able to see all the articles out there. This probably has to do with publishers and paywalls and what not, so probably not your fault, but it is still a problem that has to be dealt with in order to render this truly useful. ()

() interestingly, over time, it may not matter as much when every paper has a version on ARXIV, but in 2021 I was looking for papers influenced by work done as far ago as the 80s and 90s.

ropeladder• 5 years ago

Looks really nice. I built a similar site a few years back with an economics/policy/debate focus ( https://thicket.io ) but gave up/burned out after not getting any users and struggling to manage the data backend. It's great to see other people tackling similar problems.

charlesdaniels• 5 years ago

This is a really cool idea! I have wished for something like this for a long time. Glad to see someone built it.

Sadly however, it seems that the .bib file I get from Zotero isn't supported, since it claims to have found 0 articles in it, despite the fact that I have verified those articles show up when searching for them directly.

Edit: TIL that you can also get a .bib file from the "export items" button, as well as from "create bibliography from items". I had been using the latter. It seems that Litmaps only works with .bib files created using "export items".

axtonpitt9• 5 years ago

Ah thanks for highlighting this, will fix.

anitil• 5 years ago

I will be sending this to all my friends in academia. Bravo!

Show HN: Litmaps – Visual Research Discovery Tool

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