What Connected Papers does

Connected Papers is a web-based visual research tool that helps academic researchers, graduate students, and corporate R&D professionals discover and explore relationships between scientific papers. Founded in 2019 as a weekend side project by four Israeli founders — Alex Tarnavsky Eitan, Eddie Smolyansky, Itay Knaan Harpaz, and Sahar Perets — the platform renders interactive, force-directed graphs where papers are arranged by similarity rather than by direct citation trees. The underlying methodology combines co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling to surface semantically related works across the Semantic Scholar Paper Corpus, which covers hundreds of millions of papers across scientific disciplines. Each graph is built from approximately 50,000 papers per analysis, with Prior Works and Derivative Works views enabling users to trace both ancestor and follow-on literature.

The product is delivered entirely as a self-serve web application with a freemium entry point of 5 graphs per month. Monetization runs through tiered subscriptions: Academic at $6/month (or $72/year), Business at $20/month (or $240/year), per-seat Academic Group and Business Group plans at $6 and $20 per seat per month respectively, and an Academic Library tier with SSO/IP/email access options sold via quote. Group plans include administrator dashboards, single invoicing, and prorated seat changes. Distribution is exclusively direct-to-customer via connectedpapers.com, with no third-party resellers; payments are processed by PayPro Global. The company is privately held, bootstrapped, and reports organic, word-of-mouth adoption to hundreds of thousands of users globally.

Operationally, Connected Papers runs with a team of roughly four founders plus one DevOps contributor (Ofer Mustigman), is governed under Israeli law, and has not disclosed any external funding rounds, acquisitions, M&A activity, or formal leadership changes beyond the founding team. The firm maintains a Twitter presence, a mailing list, and a scholarship program for researchers unable to afford subscriptions. Its growth strategy is explicitly community-led and product-led, with no disclosed sales or marketing headcount, and no enterprise contracts or named institutional customers appear in the available data.

Name

Connected Papers

Legal name

Connected Papers

Website

https://connectedpapers.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

2019

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Connected Papers is a web-based visual research tool that helps academic researchers and graduate students discover and explore related academic papers through interactive similarity graphs. Built on the Semantic Scholar corpus, it serves hundreds of thousands of users globally via freemium subscriptions.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Academic Research Software

NAICS

Web Search Portals, Libraries, Archives, and Other Information Services (519), Research and Development in the Social Sciences and Humanities (54172)

SIC

Miscellaneous Publishing (2741)

akta.pro primary industry

Scholarly & Academic Multimedia (Research Videos, Interactive Figures) (EDAGALAJ)

akta.pro secondary industries

Interdisciplinary & Multidisciplinary Scholarly Publishing (EDAGAFAI), Interdisciplinary/General Education & Study Skills (EDAGABAN)

Keywords

• Academic paper discovery
• Visual citation mapping
• Literature search tool
• Bibliographic similarity analysis
• Research paper graph

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Operations, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. Premium Subscriptions: Subscription-based revenue model with tiered pricing. Free tier provides 5 graphs/month. Paid tiers (Academic at $6/month, Business at $20/month) offer unlimited graphs. Annual billing at $72/year for Academic and $240/year for Business. Group plans available with per-seat pricing.
2. Group/Enterprise Accounts: Academic Group ($6/seat/month) and Business Group ($20/seat/month) plans for organizations requiring multiple seats with administrative management and single invoicing. Academic Library tier for institutions with email, IP, and SSO access options.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels2 records

Marketing channels3 records

Core offering

Connected Papers builds a web-based visual research tool that helps academic researchers, students, and R&D professionals discover and explore academic papers through interactive force-directed graphs. Each graph is generated by analyzing approximately 50,000 papers sourced from the Semantic Scholar Paper Corpus and clustered by semantic similarity using Co-citation and Bibliographic Coupling metrics rather than direct citation chains. The product is offered as a freemium SaaS subscription with individual, team, and institutional pricing tiers.

Product overview

Connected Papers is a single, unified visual research tool built around an interactive graph-based interface. The product enables researchers to discover and explore academic papers through force-directed graph visualization, powered by similarity metrics derived from co-citation and bibliographic coupling analysis. The core offering spans a free tier (5 graphs/month), individual premium plans (Academic at $6/month and Business at $20/month), and team/institutional plans (Academic Group, Business Group, and Academic Library) that share the same underlying graph engine, Prior Works view, and Derivative Works view. All plans access the same Semantic Scholar Paper Corpus database.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Connected Papers A single SaaS product offered under multiple pricing tiers (Free, Academic, Business, Academic Group, Business Group, Academic Library). It delivers visual similarity graphs of academic papers based on co-citation and bibliographic coupling metrics, with Prior Works and Derivative Works views, multi-origin graph support, saved papers, and graph history. It is built for academic researchers, graduate students, and corporate R&D professionals conducting literature reviews and paper discovery across all scientific fields.

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Feature6 records

Partnerships

One partnership is on record.

• Semantic ScholarcoreTechnology or IntegrationConnected Papers is built on the Semantic Scholar Paper Corpus (licensed under ODC-BY), which contains hundreds of millions of published papers across many scientific fields. This data partnership is fundamental to Connected Papers' ability to provide comprehensive literature search across all scientific disciplines.

Scale indicators2 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Direct peers

• Litmaps: Litmaps is a literature-mapping tool that builds visual maps of papers based on shared references, directly competing with Connected Papers' graph-based paper discovery workflow for academic researchers.
• Research Rabbit: Research Rabbit visualizes networks of papers and authors to help researchers find prior and derivative works—an almost identical use case to Connected Papers' Prior Works and Derivative Works views.
• Inciteful: Inciteful builds citation network visualizations and 'Papers That Cite' networks for academic discovery, overlapping closely with Connected Papers' force-directed similarity graphs.
• Elicit: Elicit is an AI research assistant that searches across the academic literature and extracts findings from papers, competing for the same researcher workflow of literature review and finding relevant studies.
• Consensus: Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine that surfaces direct answers from peer-reviewed studies, directly overlapping with Connected Papers' academic discovery and synthesis use case.
• Scite: Scite analyzes how scientific papers cite each other (support/contrast/mention) and supports literature review workflows, comparable to Connected Papers' citation-relationship analysis and visualization.

Broad incumbents

• Semantic Scholar: Semantic Scholar is Connected Papers' core data partner and a broader AI-augmented academic search engine; users frequently use both for discovery, and it could expand its own visualization features to compete more directly.
• Iris.ai: Iris.ai provides AI tools for scientific R&D and literature analysis, serving similar enterprise R&D and academic customers with overlapping discovery and mapping features.

Emerging players

• Scite AI Assistant / Scispace: SciSpace (formerly Typeset) provides AI tools for reading, writing, and discovering research papers, increasingly competing in the academic literature search and discovery space alongside Connected Papers.

Others

• LitCovid: LitCovid is a curated literature hub for COVID-19 research, illustrating how specialized scholarly portals can compete in narrow research domains; useful as an adjacent reference for how research discovery portals compete and segment by field.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/ConnectedPapers
• Facebookfacebook.com/connectedpapers
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/connectedpapers

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles5 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Connected Papers