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, 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.
• 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.

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. Earlier versions of Connect ran on the academic-degree-of-separation backend.

Keyboard shortcuts

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