About Paper Nexus
Why we built a citation map of the scientific literature, how it works, and where the data comes from.
Our Mission
Paper Nexus is a graph-powered research discovery platform that makes exploring scholarly literature more intuitive and visual. By leveraging interactive graph visualizations and citation networks, we help researchers uncover hidden connections between papers, identify influential works, and explore research domains in entirely new ways.
Whether you're a seasoned researcher or just starting your academic journey, Paper Nexus makes it easier to find the information that matters most to your work.
How It Works
Search for a Paper
Enter a paper title, author name, or paste a DOI, PubMed, or MAG ID into the search bar. Paper Nexus searches across millions of academic works to find what you're looking for.
Explore the research connections
Your paper appears as part of an interactive graph showing its similarity links. Switch to citation links to see which papers it cites, which papers cite it, and how they all connect.
Discover New Research
Click any node to dig deeper, combine multiple papers for cross-topic discovery, and export the citations you find to your reference manager.
Features
Interactive Citation Graphs
Explore research visually with interactive graphs. Choose from force-directed, temporal, and radial layout modes to see your data the way you want.
Multi-Origin Search
Combine multiple seed papers to discover research at the intersection of different topics. Perfect for interdisciplinary literature reviews and finding bridging works.
Semantic Similarity
Go beyond direct citations. Toggle semantic similarity view to find papers that are conceptually related even without a direct citation link.
Citation Export
Export your discovered papers directly to Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, and other popular reference managers via BibTeX, CSV, and RIS formats.
Shareable Links
Every graph has a permanent URL. Share your discoveries with collaborators, embed links in notes, or bookmark them for later.
The Citation Map
All 137 million papers we can place, drawn as one picture and laid out so that papers citing each other sit together. Free to browse without an account: pan, zoom, recolor by field or year, and find where any paper sits.
220M+ Academic Works
Powered by OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar data covering journals, conferences, preprints, books, datasets, and more from every field of research.
Frequently Asked Questions
Paper Nexus indexes over 220 million academic works from OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar, including journal articles, conference papers, preprints, books, datasets, and more.
Multi-origin search lets you combine multiple papers as starting points to find research that bridges different topics. This is especially useful for interdisciplinary research where you want to discover papers at the intersection of two or more fields.
The citation map is a single picture of every paper we can place — 137 million of them — positioned so that papers citing one another sit near one another. Nobody drew the fields onto it; they emerge from the citations themselves. Browsing is free and needs no account: pan and zoom, recolor it by field group, topic diversity or publication year, and search any paper to see where it sits. Clicking a spot to list the most cited papers there is a map pick — free accounts get 3 a week, and the Individual plan has no limit.
The layout is built from citation links, so a paper needs at least one — in either direction — to have a position. Around 92 million works in the corpus have no citation link on record and cannot be placed; a dot in an arbitrary spot would be indistinguishable from a real one. Those papers are still fully searchable and still open in the graph, they just have no home on the map.
Yes. You can export citations from your graph directly to Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, and other reference managers via BibTeX, CSV, or RIS. You can also share your discoveries with colleagues using permanent, shareable URLs.
Paper Nexus offers a free tier that lets you explore research connections with similarity and citation links. Premium plans are available for researchers who need higher usage limits and additional features.
The Individual plan covers everyone who needs higher usage limits and premium features — researchers, professionals, and independent users alike. If you need access for a team, lab, or institution (multiple seats, volume licensing, or centralized billing), contact us about an Organization plan and we'll tailor pricing to your needs.
Data Sources
A comprehensive open catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and research topics. OpenAlex provides the foundational dataset powering Paper Nexus's search and discovery capabilities.
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A free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, developed by the Allen Institute for AI. Semantic Scholar enriches Paper Nexus with additional citation data and paper metadata.
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Powering our cloud infrastructure with scalable, reliable services.
Enabling secure, seamless payment processing for subscription management and billing.