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Visualizing the interactive arXiv landscape. (Courtesy: Damien George, Rob Knegjens)

By Matthew Chalmers

With almost a million articles accrued over the past two decades, the arXiv preprint server has become an indispensable tool for physicists.

Now, thanks to a website called Paperscape developed by theoretical physicists Damien George at the University of Cambridge in the UK and Rob Knegjens at Nikhef in the Netherlands, its vast content can be visualized in all its glory.

The interactive graphic is based on a nifty algorithm that groups arXiv papers that cite each other together, as if they were linked by invisible springs, but forces those that don’t to repel each other. The resulting map resembles an irregularly shaped galaxy in which each “star” is a scientific paper, revealing how the various categories of research (shown in different colours) relate to each other.

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