Product Overview of Connected Papers
Connected Papers is a powerful research tool designed to facilitate the exploration and visualization of relationships between scientific papers, making academic research more efficient and intuitive.
What Connected Papers Does
Connected Papers helps academics, researchers, and students to visually explore the connections between scientific papers within a specific field. Unlike traditional academic search engines, it generates a visual map of related research works, enabling users to identify key studies, track the development of ideas, and uncover gaps in the literature.
Key Features and Functionality
Visual Graphs and Network Visualization
- When a user inputs a “seed paper” (identified by DOI, URL, or title), Connected Papers creates an interactive graph that displays related papers. Each node in the graph represents a paper, and the edges connect papers based on their similarities, such as co-citation and bibliographic coupling.
Prior and Derivative Works
- The tool allows users to identify prior works, which are highly cited papers that often introduce foundational concepts, and derivative works, which are papers that cite many papers in the set. These lists help in building a strong foundation for research and staying updated with the latest trends.
Customizable Graphs
- Users can customize the graph view to focus on specific areas, change the number of nodes, or filter by date and relevance. This customization helps in exploring the research landscape more effectively.
Bibliography Creation and Enhancement
- Connected Papers aids in building comprehensive bibliographies by starting with known references and finding additional relevant papers to fill in the gaps. Users can export reference lists to reference managers like Zotero, EndNote, and Mendeley.
Multi-Origin Graphs
- A recent feature allows users to add multiple origin papers, creating a new graph where all nodes are selected based on their similarity to both origin papers. This feature enhances the ability to explore complex research networks.
Interactive Exploration
- The tool provides an interactive interface where users can hover over nodes to see details like titles, authors, and abstracts. It also highlights the shortest path from each node to the origin paper in similarity space.
Integration with Semantic Scholar
- Connected Papers leverages the Semantic Scholar database, which includes millions of papers across various disciplines, ensuring access to a vast and up-to-date corpus of research.
Benefits
- Streamlined Research: Connected Papers accelerates the process of finding relevant papers and understanding the background of research topics.
- Improved Understanding: The visual and interactive approach provides a holistic view of how studies connect and influence each other, revealing hidden relationships that might not be obvious through traditional citation lists.
- Efficient Literature Reviews: The tool helps in organizing literature reviews by identifying themes and clustering papers that belong to the same theme, enabling a more critical and analytical approach to literature synthesis.
Plans and Accessibility
- Connected Papers offers both free and premium plans. The free plan includes all features but is limited to 5 graphs per month. The premium plan, available for individuals and groups, removes these restrictions and adds additional features such as archived papers and graph history.
In summary, Connected Papers is an indispensable tool for researchers, offering a visual, interactive, and comprehensive way to explore and understand the complex network of scientific papers, thereby enhancing the efficiency and depth of academic research.