Connected Papers is a web-based visual research discovery tool that maps academic papers based on similarity and citation patterns. Rather than showing only direct citation trees, it creates a network of related works around a paper you provide as a “seed.”
Traditional keyword searches often miss relevant studies, especially in new or interdisciplinary fields. Connected Papers helps researchers, students, and practitioners find important prior and derivative works and build a more comprehensive view of the literature quickly. It’s especially useful during literature reviews, thesis research, or when entering a new domain.
You enter a paper’s title, DOI, or URL. The tool analyzes thousands of records (often using co-citation and bibliographic coupling) and draws a graph where nodes represent papers and the distances/links represent similarity. Larger nodes generally indicate highly cited works, and color/positioning provide visual cues about relationships. The graph is interactive: you can click nodes to explore deeper
