Litstudy: A Python Package for Literature Reviews

Abstract

Researchers are often faced with exploring a new research domain, which can be challenging due to the overwhelming number of relevant publications. Broad questions, such as what are the novel research avenues in this domain, are difficult to answer. Therefore, we present litstudy, a Python package that allows answering such questions using simple scripts or Jupyter notebooks.The package enables selecting scientific publications and studying their metadata using visualizations, network analysis, and natural language processing. The software was previously used in a publication about the landscape of Exascale computing, and we envision great potential for reuse.

Keywords: Literature review, Python, Jupyter, Bibliometrics