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Comment by murkt | Hacker News Reader

I remember similar kind of visualization from a decade ago, called paperscape. Looked cool, worked on clustering using citations and references.

Never got any idea on any use case that would be covered by such visualizations, apart from looking cool.

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ResearchRabbit is free and has this feature!

https://www.researchrabbit.ai/

ConnectedPapers also has this but they started to limit unless you pay:

https://www.connectedpapers.com/

A few other ones I know of:

https://litmaps.com

https://consensus.app/home/features/citation-graph/

I also made my own variant recently. I really liked the idea of litmaps but I didn't really like the UI/UX or "graph expand" feature (it uses some internal heuristic that is not very clear).

https://paper-explorer.aziis98.com/ (also on github https://github.com/aziis98/paper-explorer)

This uses OpenAlex as a source of articles and to let you explore the citation graph of papers. This is still a prototype mostly made to test out how far I could go with vibecoding (well I still checked the code now and then) something without a js framework. Someday I think I will add more features to it, but now there is already a somewhat working version of import/export so I'm fine with it.

Today you could plug this into your agent as a second brain to give it more insight on related topics and ground it's responses when doing research or building products that can benefit from cross polinating between fields.

That's usually the case with graph visualizations or clustering for networks, imo (beyond revealing obvious statistics(

I love them! It's a really nice, fun way to explore a corpus. Cosmograph for this sort of thing is great, it supports graphs as well as 2D projections, and is blazing fast.

That said, I've never had a client or stakeholder show any interest in using one, beyond an initial "that's cool".

And UMAP etc., is just as much an art as a science. You'll go mad trying to get the perfect layout.

Great toy if you're into that sort of thing, but yeah, fiddly and overwhelming for most.

Hi, I love the genre too. Cosmograph is wonderful, I did try it, but because of its license restriction I could not use it for this project. I do agree that beyond an initial "that's cool" this map may not contribute much, "and that's why I didn't make it the main product. I already had the data as I was building other things (extension, paper page) and wanted a bit of a cool factor so people would take a look at the project. The value is what's under each dot, the enriched page (TLDR, genes/drugs/diseases, trials, 3D structures, code, datasets, full text), extension and the MCP for agents.

Hello, I agree with you, viz are just cool and might not really have a usecase. In this project map is not the product, it is 1 of 4 parts and to be honest the least important. The value is what is under each dot, the enriched page (TLDR, genes/drugs/diseases, trials, protein structures, code, datasets, full text, images, reviews, etc) and the MCP for agents. You are welcome to use whichever part of the project is most useful to you (whether that is the map, paper pages, browser extension, or MCP).

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