Visual citation navigation of open education resources using Litmaps Amanpreet Kaur, Sarita Gulati, Ritu Sharma, Atasi Sinhababu and Rupak Chakravarty Introduction Litmaps was launched in 2016 by Kyle Webster, a molecular biology PhD candidate and Axton Pitt was a neuroscience BSc turned software developer to overcome the problem commonly experienced by researchers and students, i.e. navigating scientific literature, which is quite laborious and menial. Litmaps uses seed paper and overlapping maps, combining the search with citation relationships and visualization. The Literature-Map or “Litmaps” is an interface for discovering the scientific literature that helps to visualize key literature, iteratively expand research and notify new articles connected to the maps. It uses Microsoft Academic Graph combined with Semantic Scholar for analyzing the bibliography graphically, over long periods by relevance and number of citations. Litmaps allows creating interactive citation visualizations (literature maps) using keywords, authors or bibliographies. Literature maps can be bootstrapped by importing bibliographies or ORCID profiles or by incrementally adding papers via search and citation navigation. The network analysis tools provide recommendations of papers that are closely related to a current search. Litmaps also shows the recommended papers offering an intuitive research discovery experience with interactive citation maps, modern search tools and regular email updates. The maps, thus, created can be combined for exploring the intersection and interactions between different topics. Navigating academic literature using academic search engines such as Google Scholar, CORE, Web of Science and BASE is a very laborious task. Besides this, citation management software such as Zotero, Mendeley, Citavi and Rayyan. have been used to manage the citations. Researchers have to face many challenges to obtain new academic literature in the ocean of research-based database resources. Generally, we combine these tools for performing the literature review process. Litmaps has been developed to ease the complexity of reviewing the literature to facilitate the handy interactive visualization of it. It helps to accelerate the research and to discover papers smoothly by creating a literature map (Marjit, 2020). The area of interest in our case study is OER which has been visualized using Litmaps. Open Educational Resources (OER), as defined by UNESCO, are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions” (UNESCO.org, 2017). Creative Commons defines OER: [. . .] as teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities – retaining, remixing, revising, reusing and redistributing the resources (Creativecommons.org, 2020). (Table 1). Case study In our case study, we used Litmaps for creating a literature map, discovering new articles and exporting the discoveries facilitates to advance of the research. With the help of the Litmaps tool, the researcher can create a map comprising the key articles in the search area. The above figure is showcasing a map created by using the keyword “Open Educational Resources”, which further contains 36 relevant papers related to the search. The first 20 papers and 16 suggested papers were chosen for visualization that helps to understand how research papers/studies conducted by authors of disparate organizations and countries are linked/ correlated with each other. Each node represents a paper on OER, giving information about author’s name, year of publication along with the title of the paper, and the links between the authors denote its references and citation. Over the period of time, the map covers what researchers have read or need to read and shows how new articles are connected to the map. It can be observed from the above map that one of the research papers by John Hilton (2016) entitled “Open educational resources and college textbook choices: A review of research on efficacy and perceptions” has three references and eight citations. The author referred to Hyle ´n et al. (2012), Wiley et al. (2013) and Bliss et al. (2013) for their articles written on the topic “Open educational resources” And the author has received eight citations from Belikov and Bodily (2016), Ikahihifo et al. (2017), Fisher (2018), Colvard et al. (2018), Grimaldi et al. (2019), McGowan (2020), Davis and Cartwright (2020) and Jenkins et al. (2020) in their articles on the same topic (Figure 1). Litmaps allows one to curate the nodes/papers that are added, has features that allow to annotate the map, get updates of new papers and creation of multiple maps to check its overlaps. It encourages coming back over and over again to slowly improve the map. Visualization of maps shows how articles cite each other over time. This is a great way to see how articles develop gradually. In the above figure citation log of 36 papers is shown. When hovering over an article, it shows the citations received by it. In the settings, the labels option is used to show a title snippet, size nodes by citation count or a finer time scale can be chosen. Explore option crawls the citation network LIBRARY HI TECH NEWS Number 5 2022, pp. 7-11, V C Emerald Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/LHTN-01-2022-0012 7