Literature Mapping Guide

Build visual maps of scholarly literature to understand research landscapes, identify clusters of related work, and discover hidden connections between papers.

What Is Literature Mapping?

Literature mapping transforms flat lists of papers into interactive visual networks where nodes represent papers and edges represent citation or similarity relationships. This approach helps researchers:

• See the overall structure of a research field at a glance
• Identify seminal papers (highly connected nodes)
• Discover clusters and subfields
• Find bridging papers that connect disparate areas
• Spot gaps where no papers exist

Tools for Visual Literature Mapping

Connected Papers

Connected Papers (connectedpapers.com) builds a similarity graph around a seed paper using co-citation and bibliographic coupling analysis.