Seed a map from one paper you trust
Type the paper's title into the Litmaps search bar and hit enter, select it in the results, and click Explore Related Articles. Your starting article shows up as a dark dot; suggested articles appear as white ones, joined by lines that stand for citations.
Why this one: Litmaps builds outward from a seed you nominate rather than from a query, and a free account has very few maps to spend — so unlike ResearchRabbit's roomier free tier, a poorly chosen first paper costs you most of what you get.
Tweak: If your starting paper is very recent, try an older well-cited paper on the same topic instead — it has more citation links for the map to follow.
Grow the map instead of starting over
On any white dot that looks relevant, click More Like This to save it into your map, then re-run the search. The papers you just added become inputs too, so the next round of suggestions is drawn from your whole collection rather than the single paper you began with.
Why this one: Litmaps redraws the map each round, so the shape of the field visibly changes as you add to it — where ResearchRabbit's equivalent grows the collection without showing you that movement.
Tweak: Tag papers as you save them — tags are what an export or a Zotero sync works from later.
Change what the axes mean
Open a map's axis controls and set X and Y to any of Citation Count, Reference Count, Publication Date, Momentum or Map Connectivity. The same papers rearrange themselves — date against citations surfaces the old landmarks, connectivity surfaces the hubs.
Why this one: Re-sortable axes are the thing a Litmap does that a fixed similarity graph cannot. Connected Papers positions its circles by similarity and you cannot re-sort them, so "which of these is actually central" is a question only a map with adjustable axes can answer.
Tweak: Momentum is worth trying in a fast-moving field — though Litmaps' help page lists the axis options without defining them, so check what it measures in the app before you read much into it.
Turn a map into a standing alert
Save the map and switch on Monitor. Litmaps then emails you when newly published articles connect to the papers you have collected. Every account can use it, including free ones — but only paid accounts can change the settings. A free account runs on Litmaps' own default and, per the pricing table, gets a monthly summary.
Why this one: Monitor re-runs against the articles in your map rather than against a phrase, so a new paper reaches you because it cites what you collected, not because it matched your keywords. Connected Papers builds its graph once and has nothing to switch on.
Tweak: A monthly digest being too slow for your field is the clearest single reason to consider Pro. Don't count on a particular frequency: the two tables on Litmaps' own pricing page disagree — one says weekly, the other daily — and its Monitor help page offers only weekly or monthly.
Get your papers back out
Export the articles you have collected as BibTeX (the format most reference managers read), RIS (for EndNote) or CSV. Litmaps' help page describes export without naming any plan restriction, so it appears to be open to free accounts — though the pricing table does not list export either way, so that is a silence rather than a guarantee.
Why this one: The live two-way Zotero sync — where a tag in Litmaps mirrors a collection in Zotero, a popular free reference manager — is documented as a Pro feature, so on a free account the export file is the way your papers leave.
