Project
The Map of Astrophysics
An interactive graph of the people working in astrophysics and how they connect: who collaborates with whom, and how the fields cluster.
What it is
A navigable map of astrophysics as a social structure rather than a subject index: every node is a researcher, every edge a collaboration, and the clusters that fall out are the fields themselves. Drawn as a galaxy, because a graph of a hundred thousand people laid out by who pulls on whom already looks like one, and it only takes a little bending to admit it.
How it works
Two people are connected when they share a paper, and every further shared paper makes the connection heavier. A force layout (DrL, via igraph) pulls collaborators together; Leiden community detection finds the clusters. What each person works on is read from the titles of their own papers, against a hand-written vocabulary of about ninety specialities, and the clusters are named after the fields of the people standing in them. Each person is then placed on a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram of sorts: temperature is their paper count, luminosity their citations, and the two together give a class, from brown dwarf to hypergiant, with citations counted on the papers they led so that a fifty-author byline does not make fifty supergiants.
Where the data comes from
OpenAlex, released under CC0. Journal articles since 1980 whose primary topic is one of nine astrophysics topics, with papers of more than fifty authors left out. Author identities are OpenAlex’s; names that arrived without one were matched where that was unambiguous and are flagged where it was not.
Not wanting to be on it
Click your star and press Remove me. The name and numbers go, the point of light stays, and the change survives rebuilds.