Connected Papers

Connected Papers creates interactive visual graphs that map the relationships between academic papers, helping researchers discover relevant work they might otherwise miss.

Users enter a seed paper, and the platform generates a similarity graph where each node represents a paper and proximity indicates relatedness based on co-citation and bibliographic coupling analysis rather than simple keyword overlap. This visual approach reveals clusters of related research, seminal papers, and emerging trends that text-based searches fail to surface.

The Prior Works view traces the foundational papers that a given study builds upon, while the Derivative Works view shows subsequent research that cites and extends it — together creating a complete intellectual lineage.

Connected Papers is particularly powerful for researchers entering a new field, as the graph quickly reveals the most influential papers and active research directions without requiring domain expertise to craft effective search queries. The platform indexes papers from Semantic Scholar's corpus of over 200 million papers across all academic disciplines.

Each node in the graph displays the paper's title, authors, year, abstract, and citation count, and clicking through provides links to the full text. The free tier allows five graphs per month, sufficient for occasional research needs, while the premium plan supports unlimited exploration.