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Open Knowledge Maps
Literature mapping
Open Knowledge Maps is best used at the start of the literature search process, when you don’t yet have a sense of how your research topic breaks down. You enter your search term(s), and the application supplies you with 100 relevant articles divided into different categories. You can filter the results for Open Access (OA) articles.
To start, enter your search terms into the search bar. Select the BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) search option to look for relevant articles.
Figure 1: Open Knowledge Map search engine
Open Knowledge Maps then organises the 100 most relevant search results into categories in a knowledge map. As the illustration below demonstrates, the different categories are represented as different-sized 'bubbles' containing individual results. The individual articles are visible on the right-hand-side. You can click on them to visit them (if they are Open Access) and cite them for your own work.
Figure 2: Knowledge map and search results from "Knowledge management" search
Advantages
- Good when you don’t yet have a clear research route.
- Free to use without login.
Disadvantages
- At the time of writing (June 2024), the AI-driven categorisation process is imperfect, with category names that are inappropriate and/or hard to understand.
- All languages are taken into account for the search, meaning non-English articles may crowd out your search results, and there is no option to filter for language.
- Limiting search results to Open Access resources significantly reduces the number of results.