Litmaps, founded in 2019, builds visual citation maps similar in concept to Connected Papers, also covered in this directory, but adds continuous monitoring on top of the one-time graph: a saved map keeps tracking its topic and alerts the user when new papers are published that cite into or connect with that existing map.
That ongoing-alert layer matters for research that spans months or years rather than a single discovery session: a literature landscape mapped today keeps changing as new papers publish, and Litmaps' monitoring catches those additions automatically rather than requiring a researcher to manually re-run the same search periodically to check for updates.
A free tier covers standard use, and paid plans start around $10 a month for more maps and features. For a researcher tracking an active area of literature over an extended project, rather than mapping it once and moving on, Litmaps' continuous alerting on saved maps addresses a need a one-time citation graph does not.
