When starting a new project, conducting a literature review of the field can be one of the most daunting prospects. Not only do you need to get through a mountain of research papers, you also need to work out which mountain of papers to get through. You don’t want to start a project only to realise a few weeks (or months!) in that you missed a key paper which would have completely changed the course of your research. Luckily, there are now several handy tools which can help speed up this process.

Paper Digest

To start off your literature review, Paper Digest can generate a list of papers for a topic as well as an automated summary of them. The selected works are by no means exhaustive, and the summary can be a bit dodgy at times, but it’s a great starting point, especially if it’s in an unfamiliar starting point.

Connected Papers

Once you’ve identified some key papers in the field, you will then need to expand your search to other relevant papers. This is where a graph based search can be very useful, highlighting a web of related and relevant papers. With Connected Papers, you provide a seed paper which is used to generate a web of other relevant papers, connected by citations. You can also filter for derivative or prior works to your seed paper.

Litmaps

Now you should have a decent library of papers stored in your reference manager of choice. Litmaps lets you upload this library and visualise it in a graph view, as well as automatically expanding it to include any other connected papers you might have missed.