Hi LessWrong. I'm a long time lurker and finally have something that I'm really proud to share with you.

After a long beta, we are releasing Connected Papers to the public!

Connected papers is a unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work.

First - let's look at a couple of examples graphs for work that is representative of this community:

Nick Bostrom:

https://www.connectedpapers.com/main/7bba95b3d145564025e26b49ca67f13f884f8560/Superintelligence-Paths-Dangers-Strategies/graph

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares:

https://www.connectedpapers.com/main/61c368138b0211323e8773174ac3132122da07ef/Functional-Decision-Theory-A-New-Theory-of-Instrumental-Rationality/graph

Did you find new and interesting papers to read? Would this be helpful as an introduction to the literature of a new field of study?

The problem

Almost every research project in academia or industry involves phases of literature review. Many times we find an interesting paper, and we’d like to:

Find different methods and approaches to the same subject
Track down the state of the art research in the field
Identify seminal works and background reading
Explore and immerse ourselves in the topic and become aware of the trends and dynamics in the literature

Previously, the best ways to do this were to browse reference lists, or hope to find good keywords in textual search engines and databases.

Enter Connected Papers

It started as a side project between friends. We’ve felt the pains of academic literature review and exploration for years and kept thinking about how to solve it.

For the past year we’ve been meeting on weekends and prototyping a tool that would allow a very different type of search process for academic papers. When we saw how much it improved our own research and development workflows — and got increasingly more requests from friends and colleagues to use it — we committed to release it to the public.

You know… for science.

So how does it work?

Connected Papers is not a citation tree. Those have been done before.
In our graph, papers are arranged according to their similarity. That means that even papers that do not directly cite each other can be strongly connected and positioned close to each other in the graph.

To get a bit technical, our similarity is based primarily on the conc...

Eddie Smolansky

Eddie Smolansky