Europe PMC vs Litmaps

Europe PMC is a free resource for finding and reading life sciences literature from trusted sources. Its collection includes research articles, preprints, micropublications, books, reviews, protocols, and abstracts. Searches can cover abstracts and full text, with options to focus on cited articles, open peer reviews, clinical trials, preprints, or sections within articles. Publications link to supporting resources and data in more than 40 biological databases. ORCID-based author profiles show scholarly work, open access status, and citation rates over time. Europe PMC also applies text mining and machine learning to add biological terms and concepts to literature. Articles, Grants, and Annotations APIs provide programmatic access to publications, grant information, and text-mined annotations. Bulk downloads include open access articles and metadata for full-text articles; automated bulk downloading of other content is not permitted. The service integrates sources such as PubMed, PubMed Central, Agricola, and life science preprint servers, and links to legal free copies via Unpaywall when available. It is developed by EMBL-EBI with support from the Europe PMC Funders' Group and collaboration with the National Library of Medicine.

Litmaps is a web-based research tool that uses citation networks and advanced search to help researchers find papers and conduct literature reviews. Its search catalogue contains more than 270 million papers. A Litmap visualizes connections among articles through citations and references; users can annotate papers and change how the map is arranged. Topic monitoring sends automatic emails when new articles appear, and maps can be shared as images, public links, or with selected email addresses. The free plan costs nothing and includes basic search, up to 20 inputs and 100 articles, one Litmap, and a monthly summary, but no collaboration. Pro (Education) costs $10 a month, billed $120 / year - save 20%; it adds advanced search, unlimited inputs, articles, and Litmaps, plus daily or configurable alerts, and requires an academic email address. Litmaps Pro syncs Zotero collections with Litmaps Tags in both directions. Articles can also be imported from BibTeX, RIS, or PubMed files and exported in BibTeX, RIS, or CSV formats. Open Access PDFs are available to all users; other PDF access requires institutional access through LibKey.