Show HN: I mapped 8.5M research papers into an interactive atlas

37 pointsposted 17 hours ago
by leonickson
(tomesphere.com)

7 Comments

murkt

2 hours ago

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.

addycb

2 hours ago

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

specproc

an hour ago

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.

leonickson

21 minutes ago

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.

leonickson

38 minutes ago

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 can ignore the map entirely and just use the pages or extension or MCP.

gavinray

2 hours ago

Neat! Two questions I had after using it:

1) Is there a way to filter the visual atlas by the search term? For instance, I searched "ribosome" and it gave me a list, but I couldn't seem to visualize the list

2) I notice there's an MCP tool. I've used https://paperclip.gxl.ai/ in the past to good effect, curious if there are any standout features from tomesphere?