I mapped 8.5M research papers into an interactive atlas
Details
- External ID
- 48840207
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I mapped 8.5M research papers into an interactive atlas
- Website domain
- tomesphere.com
- Launched
- July 9, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 85
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8978494623655914
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
When I read papers, I have to jump between multiple tabs to find the dataset, code, videos, peer reviews, and so on. I tried to fix this with this project.It started as a project just for papers on arXiv, but after its initial success on Twitter (got like 1.9k views: the most I have gotten for a post), I have now expanded it to include other openly available papers from PubMed Central, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and eLife. These papers have been linked with their genes, proteins, diseases, drugs, clinical trials, 3D protein structures, code, and cited and similar papers.This project now has four parts:First, a map. I embedded nearly 8.5M papers (with SPECTER2), ran UMAP for 2D representation, and rendered them as a scatterplot. The dots can be clicked to see brief information about the papers, like an LLM TLDR, key findings, peer reviews, linked entities, and more. The clusters are also labeled, though you might have to zoom in.Second, I built a detailed paper page for each paper. They give you the paper's full text, images, videos, peer reviews (from OpenReview), GitHub links, Hugging Face dataset/model links, clinical trials, genes, diseases, 3D protein structures, cited papers, and similar papers. You can also copy the whole page, including the full paper text and image URLs, as markdown for your LLM.Third, I have released an extension so you can read all this information in your sidebar by clicking "open in Tomesphere" that shows up in arXiv, PMC, bioRxiv, Google Scholar, or medRxiv. I have tried to provide as much information as possible in the extension, though for things like viewing all the images or a 3D protein structure, you might still have to go to the paper page using the link provided in the extension.Fourth, all this data is available for your LLM via MCP. The MCP does have a 50-query free limit (this jumps 10x with signup).Note: this project is still in beta, so papers might have some mismatched information. I am rolling out feedback forms soon to improve the data quality. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.
Enrichment
- Theme
- searchable public records and archives
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- interactive map of research papers
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Building the interactive WebGL point-cloud atlas is vibe-codeable using Deck.gl, but processing, embedding, and reducing 8.5 million scientific papers requires high-throughput data and ML infrastructure.
What it would actually take: The frontend uses Deck.gl or three.js rendering binary buffers directly on the GPU, fed by a static or CDN-backed tile server. The backend requires a distributed pipeline (e.g., Spark/Ray on GPU clusters) to ingest millions of metadata records, run text embedding models across paper abstracts, and perform large-scale dimensionality reduction (such as GPU-accelerated UMAP or openTSNE). This requires significant cloud compute budgets and experience with large-scale vector processing pipelines.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Litmaps, Paperclip MCP, Scholar Inbox (3M map of science), Paper Explorer
Concerns raised: Entity linking accuracy for genes/diseases/proteins needs improvement, OAuth2 DCR support issues with Aperture, Paper spacing logic unclear to users, Mobile rendering performance with large datasets, Search/navigation UX could be clearer
Feature requests: Visualize relationships between adjacent/nearby papers, Filter papers by institution or author, WebGL rendering for better mobile performance, University search in paper and atlas search, Safari extension
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Launched 248 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
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