A fast, one-place browser for research papers across the leading journals in Operations, Management, Marketing, Information Systems, Economics and Computer Science.
I built The Lit because I wanted one place to search the journals I follow, instead of jumping between publisher sites. It's a personal project, and it keeps growing.
What it covers
The Lit crawls every paper published in the UTD24 and FT50 journal lists. On top of those it covers the ABS 4*, ABS 4 and ABS 3 journals that publish in Operations, Supply Chain, Economics, Computer Science, Project Management and Innovation. (Crawling the rest of the ABS lists is possible; it would just make an already slow database slower.)
Ten core sources came first, because they are the ones I follow most closely: Management Science, Operations Research, Marketing Science, M&SOM, Information Systems Research, Strategy Science, INFORMS Transactions on Education, Production & Operations Management, five PNAS topic sections, and the ACM EC conference (1999 to today).
Two further sources are covered as curated topical slices rather than in full: Nature (together with Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Communications) and Science. From those I keep only the papers on GenAI & large language models, innovation and the science of science, picked out by OpenAlex topic tags plus targeted text searches. These journals publish across all of science, so full coverage would drown everything else. They carry no ABS grade, so they show up in the Journals filter flagged “limited coverage”, without joining any journal-type bucket, exactly like the five PNAS sections. The database is close to 1 GB and needs a few more months of slow crawling to be complete.
Key novel features
- Key information per paper. Every paper shows a link to the latest open-access pre-print, its citation count, the papers it cites inside our database and the papers here that cite it. The “Citing papers of” filter turns any paper's (or any author's) citers into a searchable list of their own. (Per-paper citation counts are usually lower than Google Scholar's; that is the best free tools can do.) For Management Science, Information Systems Research and Marketing Science we also collect and display public editorial data: the area a paper appeared in and the editor who accepted it. So for Management Science you can ask what got published in a given area, or by a given editor, in their own separate filters.
- Quick views. One-click "recently added" and "open-access pre-print" filters surface the newest work and the papers you can read for free right now, so you never have to scan the whole catalog or chase a paywalled PDF. The Recently added view counts exactly what entered the database in the last four weeks, published papers and working papers separately, following whatever journal or journal-type filter you have set; the list it ships with the page is capped, so it also tells you when it is showing only the newest of them.
- Private library. Sign in to star papers, add notes, build lists and tag your reading. It all saves to your account, so your reading follows you across visits and devices instead of scattering across browser bookmarks.
- Share a list. Make any of your lists public and get a link you can send to colleagues, students or co-authors. They open a clean, read-only view of the papers in it; no sign-in required. Only each paper's title, authors, year and link are shared, never your private notes and tags, and turning the list private again disables the old link.
- Connect your ORCID. You can create your Lit account by signing in with ORCID (“Continue with ORCID” in the sign-in window), which links your verified iD automatically. You can also connect one to an existing account, either by signing in with ORCID from your profile or by typing your iD. Once linked, and if you opt in, you get a private “My publications” view: one click to your own papers in the database, each with its citation count, and to your author page in the Data Analytics spotlight. Papers are matched by the name they are actually credited with, your ORCID Published Name. Nothing about your account is made public. Ended up with two accounts, one e-mail/Google and one ORCID? Edit profile offers a one-click merge that moves everything into the account you keep and attaches ORCID sign-in to it, so it doesn't happen again.
- Saved default filters. Store a preferred set of journals or journal types and they load automatically each time you sign in, so you land straight on the subset you care about instead of re-applying the same filters every visit. Include Management Science and the modal also lets you narrow the default to a chosen accepting editor or area; include Information Systems Research or Marketing Science and you can pin a senior or associate editor. These are the same editorial filters as the main page. Prefer to see the whole catalog on entry? Save your default with nothing selected and you'll land on every journal, which overrides the built-in landing view (otherwise Management Science) for your account.
- E-mail alerts. Get an e-mail when new papers match your filters, when any new paper is added, or when the site gains a feature. A live preview and a "Send me a test e-mail" button show you how it will look before you save, so you keep up with new work without having to check back.
- Data Analytics dashboard. A separate page of interactive charts (publication volume, co-authorship, pre-print and citation trends, an author spotlight and editorial breakdowns) that turns the raw catalog into field-level summary statistics you can read at a glance. It covers every journal in the database, the same journal list as the main browser with the ABS shard catalogs included, and opens on the entire database by default. A pre-ticked “exclude non-research items” switch keeps journal front matter, book reviews, corrigenda, announcements and indices out of the figures; the main database still shows everything. The dashboard says how many items the switch is excluding, so its paper total and the main page’s header count reconcile at a glance: untick it and the two match, up to the papers added since the dashboard’s daily snapshot. Pick specific journals and every chart overlays the aggregate behaviour of the journal types they belong to (UTD24, FT50, ABS 4/4*, ABS 3) as a peer-group comparison, with toggle buttons under each chart. Narrow to Management Science and it adds accepting-editor and editorial-area filters, with senior/associate-editor filters for Information Systems Research and Marketing Science, so you can chart, say, one area's papers over time. Every tile and figure on the page follows the filter you pick; the beta Team-science figures narrow to that journal and year scope, since the disruption data itself isn't tagged by editor or area. The Author spotlight lets you add several authors and compare them side by side: publications per year, where they publish, and collaboration statistics (average co-authors per paper, how cited their co-authors are, citations per paper, mean disruption), each shown both under your current filters and across all their papers. A Paper comparison tab takes the individual paper as the unit of analysis. Add one or more papers (search the title or paste a DOI) and compare their citations, disruptiveness (Di), team size, reference age and more side by side, with charts of citations over the papers' publication years and an impact-vs-disruption map, each column headed by the paper's citation.
- Team-science & disruption index (beta). Inside Data Analytics, a work-in-progress reconstruction of Wu, Wang & Evans (Nature, 2019). It reads off the citation network how much a paper, or an author, disrupts its field rather than develops it, and how that shifts with team size, so you can gauge the character of research and not just its volume. Its most-disruptive and most-developing paper tables name the authors under each title, and give the paper's team size as a count of credited authors (“2 authors”) — the same team size the charts above plot. The aim isn't to replicate the Nature study; it's to apply its measures to our own database for further insight. The figures sharpen as the citation graph grows.
- Feedback page. A dedicated page to tell me what to fix or add, where you can attach screenshots and describe the problem in as much (or as little) detail as you like. No sign-in needed; it comes straight to me. Every submission gets a unique ticket number. Leave your e-mail and a copy of your message reaches your inbox right away, then a second e-mail on the same ticket once your report is acted on, telling you it's resolved, describing exactly what was done and linking to the fixed area of the site where possible.
- Suggest a missing published paper or a working paper. Sign in and use the form at the top of the Feedback page. For an unpublished working paper on SSRN, arXiv, NBER or OSF by an author already in The Lit, paste its link and it is checked and added automatically, usually within a few minutes, provided it fits: an author already in the database, and the paper not already there. You get an e-mail with the outcome. The metadata is always resolved from the link itself, so it lands identical to the rest of the catalog. If the paper turns out to be already published in The Lit, your link is attached to it as its open-access pre-print instead. That is handy when the automatic finder missed it because the working-paper title had changed. (Working papers that later get published are also retired automatically and shown as the published paper's pre-print, so the same work is never listed twice.) For a published paper you noticed missing from the catalog, paste its DOI (or any link that contains it) and/or its full citation. It's resolved and checked against the catalog automatically: if it's already listed you hear right back, and if it's genuinely missing its details go straight to the maintainer to review and add. Either way you get an e-mail.
How to search
You can filter by journal type (UTD24, FT50, ABS 4/4*, ABS 3, or Working Papers, the listed authors' unpublished pre-prints), by journal or by year, and search the text of authors, titles, abstracts and affiliations.
A text search with no journal or type selected covers the entire database, the unpublished Working Papers archive included. So a working paper turns up in an ordinary title or author search without having to pick the Working Papers type first, and new working papers appear in Recently added papers too, listed after the newly published ones so that a single day's batch of pre-prints never buries the new journal articles. Browsing by year alone, or with only the pre-print toggle, still shows published papers.
For Management Science you can also filter by the accepting editor and editorial area; for Information Systems Research and Marketing Science, by senior and associate editor.
A “Citing papers of” filter turns the citation graph into a search. Pick Paper and paste a DOI or a title, or pick Author and type a name, and the page shows only the papers in The Lit that cite that focal paper (or any of that author's papers). Stack journals, journal types, years or a text search on top and you can ask things like “which Marketing Science papers since 2020 cite this paper?” (In-catalog citers only, so the set grows as the graph fills in. Each card's “Cited by … references in this catalog” panel has a “Show as filtered list” shortcut straight into this filter.)
Filters stack, so everything you pick is combined, and the results bar tells you what share of the journals in scope actually matched.
On every paper
Each paper carries a small badge for the most selective list its journal is on (UTD24, then FT50, then ABS 4/4*, then ABS 3). You also get one-click BibTeX, a link to a free open-access pre-print whenever I could find one (arXiv, SSRN, NBER, OSF, bioRxiv or medRxiv), and a "cited by" count that links through to the paper on Google Scholar. PNAS papers show their Significance statement too.
Many papers also carry a "Citing references in this catalog" toggle, with a count of how many, listing the other papers they cite that are themselves in The Lit. Its mirror image, "Cited by … references in this catalog", lists the papers in The Lit that cite them. Both show each paper's authors and link straight through, so you can walk the citation graph within these journals in either direction. These lists are built slowly, by combining several reference sources (Crossref, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar), so their coverage grows over time; I expect it to be complete for every paper crawled so far by around October 2026.
What's new
The Lit keeps growing. Recent additions are logged below. You can also get them by e-mail: on The Lit, sign in and open E-mail alerts from your account menu, then turn on New features & updates to the website. Daily sends each update as it lands; weekly and monthly batch them.
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Where the data come from
Editors and editorial areas are shown for Management Science papers from 2011 onwards. The other sources contribute their published papers and Articles in Advance. Every journal's Articles in Advance, Forthcoming and Accepted papers count toward its listing, and when you sort by newest year they sit at the top, newest additions first, ahead of that year's published issues. ACM EC papers link out to an arXiv, SSRN or open-access PDF wherever one exists.
How fresh it is. Alongside a full daily rebuild, The Lit checks the eight Articles-in-Advance journals (Management Science, Operations Research, Marketing Science, M&SOM, Information Systems Research, Strategy Science, INFORMS Transactions on Education and Production & Operations Management) for freshly-published papers every 15 minutes. A new Article in Advance usually appears, and joins the Recently added view, within minutes of Crossref indexing it rather than the next day. Econometrica and the European Journal of Operational Research are checked the same way every 20 minutes — EJOR is the busiest journal here, around 700 papers a year plus a steady stream of Articles in Press, so its new work now lands within minutes instead of waiting for the nightly rebuild. Econometrica's Forthcoming Papers list is followed too, so accepted papers can show up before they reach an issue. Each new paper is enriched on arrival, so its open-access pre-print link and citation count are there from the start; a paper whose abstract the publisher deposits a few days later (common for EJOR) picks it up on the next check rather than at the nightly rebuild. (Pre-print links and citation counts across the whole back-catalogue keep refreshing in the background too.)
The Journal types filter covers the UTD24 list and the full FT50 research rank. Journals beyond the ten core sources come from this app's own dataset, which is refreshed daily, checked against the FT's list once a year, and downloaded only when you need it. The badge to the left of a title shows the single most selective list a journal belongs to, with one exception: a journal that sits on both the UTD24 and FT50 lists shows both. A broader filter still finds the paper, so an ABS 4/4* search includes every UTD24 journal. ABS ratings follow the Chartered ABS Academic Journal Guide (AJG 2024), as mirrored at journalranking.org. Beyond the FT50 and UTD24 lists I have kept ABS coverage to Operations, Supply Chain, Economics, Computer Science, Project Management and Innovation. HBR and MIT Sloan Management Review are FT50 journals and badged as such; the guide gives them no number, so they keep their last numeric grade and the ABS 3 filter still finds them.
All of the metadata is public, collected through the Crossref API, with OpenAlex, DBLP and Semantic Scholar helping fill in the EC PDF links. PNAS section labels come from pnas.org's own topic index where it has one, and are otherwise approximated from each paper's OpenAlex topic. The Nature-portfolio and Science slices are selected the same way, by each paper's OpenAlex topics plus targeted title/abstract searches, since science.org offers no public per-article topic taxonomy. The papers I specifically asked for are pinned into the filter explicitly.