What is this
8,396,458 OpenAlex authors with 15 or more works, positioned
by a coauthorship ForceAtlas2 layout and colored by community. Hue
encodes position, so neighboring fields share hues.
Built by Eric Gao,
a student at UC San Diego.
Reading the map
Each dot is a researcher, placed near the people they write papers
with and colored by their community: a field, or a national research
network. Lighter and darker shades of a color are its subgroups, and
bigger dots mean more citations. Top author dots mark the most-cited
researchers before you zoom in close.
Faint lines join the million most frequent coauthor pairs. They are
on at their faintest on computers (the gear's Line visibility slider
brightens them); switch them on/off with Connection lines in the
gear.
Cosmic dust (off by default; switch it on in the gear) is the
faint grey haze of researchers the map cannot place in a field:
authors with no coauthor links on the map, groups too small for the
legend (under 1,000 researchers), and near empty records with no
institution and few citations. Most of it forms the ring around the
map's edge. These authors stay searchable either way.
Controls
- Search finds one researcher and draws rays to their top
coauthorships, colored by community membership - a ray's
gradient means it crosses between fields. Rays work standalone,
straight from OpenAlex, with no companion server required.
- Connect finds the shortest coauthor path between two
researchers, searched right in your browser over the map's whole
coauthor network, colored the same way hop to hop, with the paper
that links each step. Choose From: Institution to start from up to
50 most-cited researchers with an OpenAlex last-known affiliation.
The result is the shortest among those mapped candidates, subject to
the same search limits, not necessarily the whole institution.
- Hover a dot at deep zoom to see the author's name and
citations; click it for full details.
- Share copies a link to the exact view.
- The gear opens display settings, including connection lines
between frequent coauthors, and an optional OpenAlex API key
for live lookups.
Data
Built from the OpenAlex snapshot of 2026-09-23 (CC0): 8.4M
authors and 366M coauthor links. Source code and method:
mapademic on GitHub.
Connect and the coauthor rays come from
academic-degree-of-separation
by riptideiv,
whose backend powered them until October 2026; the search now runs
in your browser.
Known issues in the data
OpenAlex builds its author profiles automatically, and they have
errors that show up on the map:
- Merged namesakes. Several people who share a common name
can end up in one profile. Many of the biggest hubs are such
merges, some listing hundreds of institutions in a single year.
Their cards say so, and Connect routes around them when a path at
most one step longer exists.
- Split and duplicate profiles. One person can have several
profiles: about one profile in 16 is a fragment of someone's
record. Many Chinese, Japanese and Korean researchers also have a
second profile in their own script for their domestic-language
papers. It usually sits in its own, almost uncited cluster,
away from their main profile.
- Records that aren't people. A few thousand profiles are
organizations, teams, typesetters or placeholders such as
"unknown unknown".
- Snapshot versus today. The map is the 2026-09-23 snapshot.
OpenAlex keeps merging and splitting profiles, so a card's live
details can differ from the profile's place on the map. Names
come from OpenAlex live, or from the snapshot when OpenAlex
can't answer.
- Area names. Each colored area is named for the fields most
typical of its coauthorship group. A small group folded into a
larger area takes that area's name, so the label can differ from
your own field; a card's Topics row shows the researcher's own.
Keyboard shortcuts
- / focus search
- ? toggle this help
- Esc close the topmost panel
- ↑ / ↓ move through dropdown results
- Enter select the highlighted result