What is this

8,587,906 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.

Reading the map

Bright splats are highly-cited authors (60,000+ citations). The faint grey web visible at z8-9 is repeat coauthorships - at max zoom the map stays clean, and you see a researcher's coauthorships by searching them or via the info card's Coauthors button. The faint grey speckle in dark areas is background dust - authors with no retained coauthor links, kept searchable but not rendered as interactive dots. The gear's Full point cloud toggle sizes and colors every author as a dot at every zoom, not just up close, and hides the raster splats while it's on; the Top-author dots checkbox controls a lighter top-cited overlay below deep zoom on its own.

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 via the degree-of-separation engine, colored the same way hop to hop - this does need that companion server running.
• 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.
• The gear's Equalize slider spreads dense areas toward more uniform spacing; positions are a visual transform, not a change to the underlying layout.

Data

Built from an OpenAlex snapshot. See the academic-degree-of-separation project for the path-finding engine.

Keyboard shortcuts

• / focus search
• ? toggle this help
• Esc close the topmost panel
• ↑ / ↓ move through dropdown results
• Enter select the highlighted result