Connected Papers

What is Connected Papers?

Connected Papers is an innovative digital service designed specifically for researchers, academic students, and scientists. The platform solves the problem of discovering relevant academic papers using visual graphs and semantic connection trees. Instead of searching Google Scholar for keywords in a tedious linear list, Connected Papers generates interactive diagrams that interconnect related papers through citation and topic similarity.

How it works

To map the literature of a topic, the user types the title of a known relevant paper (the "seed paper"). Connected Papers analyzes its database containing over 80 million articles. It generates a graph where each node is a scientific paper. The distance between nodes represents the level of conceptual similarity and shared bibliographic references. Larger nodes represent more cited papers, and the connections indicate the degree of mutual relevance, allowing users to map the entire bibliography of a topic quickly.

Key features

• Visual Literature Mapping: Interactive 2D visualization of how academic papers relate in a non-linear way.
• Prior Works Identification: Automatic tool that finds the oldest foundational reference papers on the searched topic.
• Derivative Works Identification: Instant location of systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and new papers that cited the papers in the graph.
• Reference Manager Integration: Easy export of reference lists to bibliography management tools.

Available integrations

The platform works in an integrated way with the main scientific databases:

• Access to the Semantic Scholar and PubMed databases.
• Direct export of bibliographic references in formats compatible with Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote (.BibTeX or .RIS formats).

Who it is for

• Graduate Students (Master's and PhD) who need to review the literature of a topic to build their theoretical frameworks.
• Researchers and Scientists interested in keeping up with the latest papers published in their fields.
• R&D Professionals who need to validate technical studies before launching projects.

Pricing

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Extraordinary ease of discovering relevant papers that wouldn't appear in ordinary linear text searches.
• Helps avoid "missing" crucial papers published recently.
• Allows building the literature review of an academic work much faster.

Cons:

• The database may have more modest coverage of papers in Portuguese or very specific humanities.
• The free plan is very restricted and consumes monthly search credits quickly.

Alternatives to Connected Papers

The main alternatives for visual mapping of academic literature are: ResearchRabbit, Litmaps, Elicit, Consensus, and Semantic Scholar.