Mapping the world of academic papers with Connected Papers

If your job is writing (or reading) academic papers, my condolences. But here’s a sparkly new tool that’ll certainly help you in your work: Connected Papers. Built by Israelis Alex Tarnavsky, Eitan Eddie Smolyansky, and Itay Knaan Harpaz, this tool they made for themselves proved so popular that they’ve turned it into a free online resource. And the premise is so simple that it makes one wonder why it didn’t already exist: it creates a graph map between academic papers and their sources, with number of citations, publishing year and similarity all displayed visually. You can read more about the background to the project here.