Cosmograph / Galactic 🌌

A scientist's life's work, rendered as a galaxy you can fly through.

Cosmograph (also known as Galactic) turns any researcher's complete body of work into an explorable 3D universe: research domains become suns, papers become planets orbiting them (size = citations, orbit distance = topic relevance), and frequent co-authors become moons. Fly the spaceship through the disk or pull back into a god's-eye planetarium view, click any world for its details, and watch the whole corpus light up at once.

It started as a Father's Day gift for stem-cell scientist Dr. Mahendra S. Rao — and is now an open-source template you can point at any scientist: a parent, a mentor, a hero, or yourself.

The shipped snapshot (Dr. Rao) spans 364 papers, 28,860 citations, 1,191 co-authors, and 12 research domains across 30 years (1994–2024) — roughly 1.4 million words of published science, drawn as one navigable galaxy.

🔭 Live demo: https://cosmograph.space (or https://galactic.dad)

🎬 Watch the launch trailer: cosmograph.space/trailer — a 30-second flight through the galaxy before you dive in yourself. (There's also a Watch the trailer button on the site's title screen, right below Ad Astra.)

The trailer above is a rendered capture of the standalone /trailer/ video artifact (artifacts/trailer/). To regenerate it after changing the trailer, re-capture the running /trailer/ route to MP4 and overwrite docs/trailer.mp4.

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Highlights

• 🌌 A real galaxy, not a chart. Photoreal suns, orbiting planets, and moons rendered with React Three Fiber, drei, and postprocessing — each domain gets its own stellar color and every orbit reads like a planetary system.
• 🚀 Two ways to explore. A first-person spaceship fly-through with momentum, and a god/planetarium orbit view with an adjustable axis.
• 🔭 Everything is clickable. Open any planet for paper details, any sun for a domain breakdown, and a stats layer that summarizes the entire body of work.
• 🛰️ Live presence (optional). Faint "wisps" mark other visitors exploring the same galaxy, with a live "N cosmonauts streaming now" headcount — anonymous and in-memory, nothing is persisted.
• 🧬 No hardcoded identity. The title, stats, domains, papers, and co-authors all come from a generated data snapshot. Regenerate it for a different scientist and the whole universe redraws.
• ⚡ Fast and reliable by design. The full dataset is fetched once at build time and baked into a static JSON file — no backend or database is needed for the core visualization.

How it works

Cosmograph pulls a researcher's complete publication record from OpenAlex (free, open, no API key — Google Scholar has no public API). A one-time script crunches that record into a single static snapshot:

• Research domains ("suns") are derived from OpenAlex's topic hierarchy at the subfield level, with long-tail subfields folded into a "Cross-Disciplinary" sun (target ~6–12 suns).
• Each paper ("planet") is sized by citation count and placed at an orbit distance reflecting its relevance to the domain.
• Headline stats (papers, citations, h-index, i10, counts-by-year, top institution) are computed from the kept works.

The galaxy itself is a fully static bundle. Realtime presence and the GitHub star count are an optional enhancement served by a small always-on API server — the galaxy degrades gracefully if it's unreachable.

Quick start

Requires pnpm and Node.js 24+.

pnpm install

# Run the galaxy web app (served at /)
pnpm --filter @workspace/cosmograph run dev

# (Optional) run the presence + GitHub-stars API server
pnpm --filter @workspace/api-server run dev

Useful repo-wide commands:

pnpm run typecheck     # full typecheck across all packages
pnpm run build         # typecheck + build everything

Make it for your own scientist

The app ships with no hardcoded identity — everything the UI shows comes from artifacts/cosmograph/src/data/galaxyData.json. To feature someone else, regenerate that snapshot:

# By name (prints the top OpenAlex matches to stderr so you can sanity-check)
pnpm --filter @workspace/cosmograph run fetch:galaxy -- --name "Ada Lovelace" \
  > artifacts/cosmograph/src/data/galaxyData.json

# Or by exact OpenAlex author ID (more precise)
pnpm --filter @workspace/cosmograph run fetch:galaxy -- --id A5111365293 \
  > artifacts/cosmograph/src/data/galaxyData.json

Then restart the galaxy — the title, stats, domains, papers, and co-authors all redraw from the new snapshot.

Disambiguation

OpenAlex occasionally lumps two distinct scientists who share a name under one author ID. The fetch script can drop the wrong person's works and recompute every headline stat from only the kept works:

Flag	Effect
--exclude-institution <OpenAlexInstId>	Drop works affiliated with this institution (repeatable)
--exclude-coauthor <OpenAlexAuthorId>	Drop works co-authored with this person (repeatable)
--min-year <YYYY> / --max-year <YYYY>	Drop works outside this publication-year range

Disambiguate by research cluster (institution + co-author), not by year alone. See CONTRIBUTING.md for a detailed walkthrough.

Project structure

This is a pnpm monorepo.

artifacts/
  cosmograph/        # The galaxy web app (React + Vite + React Three Fiber), served at /
    src/data/        #   galaxyData.json — the baked-in snapshot (source of truth)
    scripts/         #   fetch-galaxy.mjs — regenerates the snapshot from OpenAlex
  api-server/        # Express API: realtime presence (WebSocket) + GitHub-stars cache
  trailer/           # ~45s launch trailer (motion-graphics video artifact), previewed at /trailer/
lib/
  api-spec/          # OpenAPI spec — the source of truth for the API contract
  api-client-react/  # Generated React Query hooks (Orval)
  api-zod/           # Generated Zod schemas
  db/                # PostgreSQL schema + Drizzle ORM

Tech stack

• Frontend: React, Vite, React Three Fiber + drei + postprocessing, Framer Motion, Tailwind
• Backend: Express 5 (Node.js 24, TypeScript 5.9)
• Data: PostgreSQL + Drizzle ORM; OpenAlex for publication data
• Contracts & validation: OpenAPI → Orval codegen, Zod (zod/v4)
• Build: Vite (web), esbuild (server)

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome — bug reports, feature ideas, and pull requests alike. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md for local setup, the disambiguation guide, and our development workflow. Please also review our Code of Conduct.

Found something exploitable? See SECURITY.md for how to report it privately.

📜 License

MIT © Interspace Venture. Publication data from OpenAlex.