About Academic Descent
Every paper stands on earlier work. Academic Descent lets you trace that ancestry: start from one paper, open what it cites, then what those papers cite, as far back as the records go.
How to use it
- Search for a paper by title.
- Tap a paper to read its details and open its references. Tap it again to fold them away.
- Move around with drag and pinch, or switch to List for the same tree as an outline.
- Read left to right: each arrow points to a paper being cited, so moving right moves back through the work.
- Read top to bottom: each paper's references run from oldest to newest. Any with no known year come last.
Reading the boxes
- The paper you started from
- Has references you can open
- Open, with its references showing
- Repeat: this paper is already elsewhere in the tree
- Dead end: no references on record
Where the data comes from
Paper data comes from OpenAlex, a free and open catalog of the world's scholarly research, and OpenCitations adds references that OpenAlex is missing. Neither is complete, especially for older papers, so a list can differ from the one printed in the paper, and a dead end means nothing is on record, not that the paper cites nothing. Each paper shows up to 100 references.