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What is literature mapping?
Literature mapping allows you to get an overview of your field of study. It can help you produce a literature review at the start of a research project.
We can define literature mapping as the process of understanding and representing the relationships between pieces of research. These pieces of research most frequently mean papers (journal articles and conference papers), but also include books (textbooks and monographs) and unpublished research (doctoral and masters’ theses).
In simpler terms, literature mapping means seeing the way research results and ideas have been passed down between researchers who have built on each other’s work in an ongoing academic conversation. One way of thinking about it is as if knowledge has a family tree, with ancestors and descendants.
Figure 1: Concept map of literature mapping
Citation chaining
Citation chaining can be regarded as a manual form of literature mapping. It means using the links and resources available in search engines (Google Scholar, BASE, Semantic Scholar) and databases, as well as the papers themselves, to find similar or related papers.
- References
Check the references at the end of the article to find precedents or ancestors to the research paper. This is called backwards citation chaining.
- “Cited by”
Use the “Cited by” (or “Citations” or similar) hyperlink in the search engine/database to find descendants of the research paper. This is called forwards citation chaining.
- Keywords
Pay attention to the research paper’s keywords, available in the database or below the abstract in the article itself, and search for them to find similar papers.
- Author search
Search for other work created by the author of the research paper.
- “Related articles”
Make use of the search engine/database’s similarity algorithm to find papers with similar content. This might include papers with the same or similar keywords, authors, references or citations.
Figure 2: Navigating information about an article found on Semantic Scholar
Figure 3: Using the advanced search function on Google Scholar
Literature mapping platforms
As well as manual citation chaining, applications using AI-driven algorithms offer research mapping options. Many of these applications require subscription, but all the below offer at least some free options for researchers. Click on the links below to find out more.