Academic Ancestry Map

Trace academic lineage from a person, paper or term

Problem

Researchers want to understand how the shoulders of giants were built, but existing academic tools only show citation networks, not mentorship and knowledge transfer. Figuring out someone's advisor or how a term traveled between scholars still requires manual searching and scattered memory.

Solution

An interactive academic lineage browser: enter a person, paper or term, and it extracts mentorship, collaboration and citation relationships from open scholarly data into explorable timelines or trees. Filter by field, institution and era for reviews, talks or collaboration hunting.

Users

Grad students, postdocs, historians and sociologists of science, review authors and lecturers mapping a field

MVP

Person/paper/term search entry; mentorship and co-authorship graph; timeline and tree view toggle; field, institution and era filters; PNG/SVG export and shareable links

Revenue

Free basic access, paid subscription for advanced filters, bulk export and team collaboration; or institutional licenses for university libraries

Why now

Open scholarly metadata and LLM extraction are mature enough to semi-automate what used to be manual curation; vertical search is a gap giants' general search leaves open