Scholarly Pattern Explorer
Explore computer-science research by meaning instead of keywords. About 100,000
papers (2015 to Oct 2026) from OpenAlex are embedded, placed on an interactive
galaxy, and mined for topic combinations that are emerging, fading, or missing.
Live site: https://scholarly-pattern-explorer.vercel.app
Each dot is a paper. Papers that share ideas sit close together, and colours mark
topic clusters. Hover a dot to read the paper; search by meaning ("protein folding")
rather than exact words.
About the data: the database holds a stratified sample, not every paper. It is
100,061 computer-science papers (about 678 per month, 2015 to Oct 2026), roughly 4-6%
of OpenAlex's output for the field. The Progress page shows the sample next to
OpenAlex's own monthly totals. Supports and counts are shares within the sample.
The free database tier (500 MB) is the reason for the cap.
What you can do
| Page | What it shows |
|---|
| Galaxy | 2D and 3D map of the papers, semantic search, highlighted research gaps |
| Countries | Who publishes what: shared, split and full credit counting, a globe with collaboration arcs, per-country specialised topics |
| Patterns | Frequent topic itemsets, association rules, pattern lifecycles, research gaps |
| Progress | What each data load added |
| Saved | Papers you keep |
How the patterns work
- Each paper is a basket of OpenAlex topics. FP-Growth finds topic sets that appear
together often. Size is the number of topics in the set; support is the
share of papers in the window that contain all of them.
- Windows are 3 years wide and step by 1 year (2015-2017 up to 2024-2026).
- Rules (A → B) come from the itemsets: confidence = support(A∪B) / support(A),
lift = confidence / support(B).
- Born / died: a pattern is born in the first window where it appears and dies
the first window after its last appearance. They change when windows are re-mined
or a new window completes, not with every monthly update.
- Gaps are computer-science topics that are growing but small, or closely related
topic pairs that few papers connect.
Architecture
apps/web: Next.js front end (Vercel)apps/api: FastAPI service (Render, free tier)ml/: embeddings, pattern mining, gaps, emerging topics, searchpipeline/: OpenAlex ingest and country statistics- Supabase Postgres with pgvector stores papers and embeddings
- GitHub Actions run a keep-alive ping and a monthly data update
Run it locally
# web
cd apps/web && npm install && npm run dev # http://localhost:3000
# api
cd apps/api && pip install -r requirements.txt && uvicorn app.main:app --reload
# tests
cd apps/web && npm test
cd apps/api && pytest
python -m pytest ml
More
Data: OpenAlex. Licence: see LICENSE.
