Publication Graph

To get a visual representation of citations between different authors, I built a visualization tool. You can add multiple authors to a list, and the tool then gathers all the publications where the selected authors have contributed. It then checks if any of the selected authors have publications that cite the work of the others.

You can check it out live here: pubgraph.app.svenangerer.de

Under the Hood

Building this required a modern, highly-performant stack to handle the data fetching and 3D rendering smoothly:

• Data Source: The tool relies on the incredible OpenAlex API, an open-science database that provides completely free, public domain (CC0) metadata on hundreds of millions of scientific works.
• Backend: A FastAPI (Python) server handles the API fetching and the heavy mathematical clustering logic. To keep things fast and respect rate limits, a Redis instance caches up to 500 MB of recent searches using an LRU eviction policy.
• Frontend: Built with React, using Plotly.js (WebGL) to render the 3D interactive graph without crashing the browser.
• Deployment: The whole system is containerized with Docker Compose and hosted via Dokploy.

Below the 3D graph, the app also generates an aggregated summary table so you can instantly see exactly how many times Author A cited Author B, alongside an expandable list of the specific papers involved.

Give it a spin and see how your favorite researchers’ works intertwine: pubgraph.app.svenangerer.de