Connected Papers

Connected Papers is a visual tool for exploring academic literature. It generates interactive graphs showing how research papers are connected through citations, helping researchers discover relevant work and understand research landscapes.

Connected Papers offers a free tier with limited graph generations. Premium plans provide unlimited access with additional features. Academic discounts are available for students and researchers.

Connected Papers analyzes co-citation and bibliographic coupling patterns between papers. Papers that are frequently cited together appear closer in the graph, revealing research clusters and trends.

Connected Papers provides more detailed citation graphs for specific papers. Research Rabbit offers better collection building and broader discovery. Connected Papers suits deep analysis of a specific paper; Research Rabbit for building research libraries.

Yes, you can save and organize your graph explorations in your library. This helps you track your literature discovery process and return to previous research paths.

Connected Papers covers a wide range of academic disciplines but works best in fields with well-established citation networks. Coverage is strongest in computer science, medicine, and the natural sciences.

Each bubble is a paper related to your input, sized by citation frequency, so the biggest bubbles are usually the foundational works in that area. Lines encode similarity built from co-citation and bibliographic coupling patterns: papers that are frequently cited together sit closer together, and tighter clusters signal an active research thread. The prior works and derivative works views extend the same map backward and forward in time, showing what your input built on and what later papers built on it. Once you read the graph this way, scanning a new field takes minutes instead of days.

The free plan includes a small monthly quota of graph builds, which is enough for occasional lookups but not for a full literature review. The Academic plan at $72 per year, about $6 per month, removes the friction for regular research use and remains one of the cheapest subscriptions in the research tool category.

Yes. Start from your seed paper, use the prior works view to trace the foundations of the field, and the derivative works view to find recent studies building on it. The co-citation structure surfaces influential papers that keyword searches miss, and graphs can be exported and shared with your supervisor or committee.

Yes. The derivative works view highlights later papers that build on the seed, and because graphs are built from co-citation and bibliographic coupling, influential recent work tends to appear as new bubbles in the relevant cluster. It is a practical way to check whether a field has moved on since the seed was published.

Yes. Built-in export and sharing capabilities let you send a graph link or export it for presentations, and teammates can explore the same similarity map without rebuilding it. The Business plan adds custom options for teams that run recurring literature scans.

No. Connected Papers maps relationships between papers using co-citation and bibliographic coupling data, it does not summarize content or answer questions about papers. For reading and summarization, pair it with an AI research assistant, then use Connected Papers to verify where each paper sits in the broader landscape.