Source: https://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2021/06/playing-devils-adovcate-why-newly.html

 

Playing devil's advocate - Why the newly popular literature mapping tools may not be useful for the average researcher

I have become increasing bullish on the rise of what I have called innovative literature mapping tools which have been emerging in the last two to three years thanks to the increasing availability of openly Scholarly metadata (in particular title, abstracts and citation data).

I would identify Barney walker's Citation Gecko released in 2018 as the first of it's class of  user friendly tools targeted at researchers that aim to help with literature (mostly narrative review) searches.

You typically enter some relevant seed paper and it will attempt to recommend related papers (typically using citation relationships) using it's built-in index of papers drawn from mostly open sources.  Some common tools and the indexes/sources of data used are listed below (as of June 2021).

Tool	Major index & Sources used
Citation Gecko	OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI Citations(COCI) & OpenCitations Corpus (OCC)
Local Citation Network	Microsoft Academic Graph, Crossref, OpenCitations
Cocites	NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH OCC)
Connected Papers	Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus
Paper Graph	Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus
Inciteful	Microsoft Academic Graph,Semantic Scholar (abstracts), Crossref,OpenCitations
Litmaps	Microsoft Academic Graph (primary source)
Citation Chaser	Lens.org

Besides suggesting or recommending papers, you will also usually get a nice visualization or map of both the seed papers and papers recommended. Another commonality I have identified is that most of these tools are implemented as web services so there is no setup cost to install the software (though some open source ones like Citation Gecko do allow you the option to run a local install)

I think after due consideration, a more accurate terminology for them should be Citation based Literature mapping services but for now I will use the generic name "literature mapping tool".

These tools are very new with the latest ones emerging in 2020. Some of them like Connected Papers seems to have struck a chord. For example, this tiktok video on Connected Papers garnered 2.5 million views! My post on r/Phd on these tools (link to this medium post) got 400+ upvotes and dozens of awards and enthusiastic thanks and various social media accounts of these tools are showing very good responses from their fans. But are such reactions only based on first impressions?

As such I think it is often a good idea when advocating for something new to switch hats and consider why the new shiny idea might not be good. That is why in this post  I will play devil's advocate and try to argue why such tools really aren't that useful to the average researcher when doing literature review.

In this long post, I will first describe how such tools typically work and then distinguish them from other similar tools such as "Science mapping tools". 

Finally, I will then play devil's advocate on why such tools aren't really useful and possible answers to those doubts.