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When searching for relevant literature you may sometimes be more interested in closely-related papers than completely new studies, for example when there are follow-up studies or when there is a foundational discovery of which you want to see how it developed over time. Some literature search websites, which are commonly powered by Semantic Scholar in the background, can visualize these connections for you and show how knowledge may have developed over time throughout academic literature. We will provide one example of such a tool here, though there are several alternatives available, which are listed at the bottom of this page.

As example we have used the paper ‘Yield gap analysis with local to global relevance  A review’ from WUR’s own prof. Martin van Ittersum as input for the map. After searching through Semantic Scholar the tool returns a map of the most relevant papers, using colours to indicate the recency of the publication (darker colours representing more recent papers). Each line between a paper indicates a similarity between the papers, but not necessarily a direct citation by a paper.

Next to this information you can add more papers to this map to expand the view the tool takes of literature (adding more ‘Origins’). A list of the ‘top’ papers found is also visible on the left-hand side of the tool. In addition you can also look at a more specific analysis of the information, specifically which papers are often cited by the papers in the graph as foundational information (‘Prior works’) and which papers often cite the papers listed in the graph (‘Derivative works’). This may help find strongly connected papers. These lists can also be sorted by the citations the paper has, thus narrowing the scope to more foundational papers.