Paperscape is a very cool tool developed by Damien George and Rob Knegjens. It analyzes papers from arXiv, the paper repository where almost all physics and math papers live these days. By putting papers that cite each other closer together and pushing papers that don’t cite each other further apart, Paperscape creates a map of all the papers on arXiv, arranged into “continents” based on the links between them. Papers with more citations are shown larger, newer papers are shown brighter, and subject categories are indicated by color-coding.

Here’s a zoomed-out view:

Already you can see several distinct continents, corresponding to different arXiv categories like high energy theory and astrophysics.

If you want to find amplitudes on this map, just zoom in between the purple continent (high energy theory, much of which is string theory) and the green one (high energy lattice, nuclear experiment, high energy experiment, and high energy phenomenology, broadly speaking these are all particle physics).

When you zoom in, Paperscape shows words that commonly appear in a given region of papers. Zoomed in this far, you can see amplitudes!

Amplitudeologists like me live on an island between particle physics and string theory. We’re connected on both sides by bridges of citations and shared terms, linking us to people who study quarks and gluons on one side to people who study strings and geometry on the other. Think of us like Manhattan, an island between two shores, densely networked in to the surroundings.

Zoom in further, and you can see common keywords for individual papers. Exploring around here shows not only what is getting talked about, but what sort of subjects as well. You can see by the color-coding that many papers in amplitudes are published as hep-th, or high energy theory, but there’s a fair number of papers from hep-ph (phenomenology) and from nuclear physics as well.

There’s a lot of interesting things you can do with Paperscape. You can search for individuals, or look at individual papers, seeing who they cite and who cite them. Try it out!