Research Field Atlas
Complete structural map of a research field — institutions, citations, funders, gaps.
The Research Field Atlas is a complete structural map of a research field — the institutions actively producing, the citation trajectories of sub-areas, funder concentration, country specialization, and the most consequential signal: clusters of researchers working on similar problems with no existing collaboration.
Built from publication and citation data across more than two hundred million scholarly works (OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, plus the relevant publisher-side bibliographic stacks), the deliverable is a policy-grade artifact: a complete corpus map across a three-to-five-year window, an institution-pair gap analysis, citation velocity time series, funder and country breakdowns, named-researcher influence ranking, and a methodology appendix suitable for external citation. Quote-only; typical commissions run $7,500–25,000.
Built for foundation program officers, government science agencies, corporate R&D strategy, vice provosts for research, and policy think tanks allocating science funding.
Where is the field already going, and where are the gaps that funding could close?
What buyers actually ask.
Where is this research field already going, and where are the gaps that funding could close?
The Research Field Atlas answers exactly this. Citation velocity time series identify rising and declining sub-areas; institution-pair gap analysis surfaces clusters of researchers working on similar problems with no collaboration; the funder breakdown shows where capital is concentrating versus where it is missing.
How big is the corpus you build the atlas from?
OpenAlex alone covers more than two hundred million scholarly works. We pull the field-relevant subset across a three-to-five-year window — typically tens to hundreds of thousands of works depending on field — and map the structure across that corpus.
What is institution-pair gap analysis?
For each pair of institutions actively producing in the field, we measure how much they should be collaborating (based on topical similarity of their corpora) versus how much they actually are (based on co-authorship). Pairs with high topical similarity and zero co-authorship are the named gaps.
How is this priced?
Quote-only. Typical commissions run between $7,500 and $25,000 depending on field breadth, time window, and the depth of policy-grade methodology appendix the buyer needs. Scope is set during intake.
Why quote-only and not fixed-fee?
Field breadth varies materially. A niche subfield with five hundred active researchers and a broad cross-disciplinary field with fifty thousand active researchers carry different data and analyst budgets. We scope each commission against the actual corpus rather than charging the same for both.
How is this different from a Web of Science or Scopus report?
Bibliometric platforms produce an analyst's database; the Atlas produces an artifact. Funder and country breakdowns, gap analysis, named-researcher influence, and the policy-grade appendix are the analytical layer the platforms do not produce.
How long does the engagement take?
Typically four to eight weeks end-to-end. Corpus pull and clustering are the long-pole steps; methodology appendix drafting and review extend the back end.
The deliverable, in detail.
- Complete corpus map across a three-to-five-year window with semantic clustering across publication and citation data.
- Institution-pair gap analysis: who should be talking but is not, ranked by topical similarity and observed co-authorship.
- Citation velocity time series identifying rising and declining sub-areas, computed at the cluster level.
- Funder concentration and country specialization breakdowns derived from grant-acknowledgement parsing and funding-body APIs.
- Named-researcher influence ranking with citation centrality, h-index trajectory, and affiliation-movement signal.
- Policy-grade methodology appendix suitable for external citation, documenting every source and every analytical choice.
How the report is built.
The Research Field Atlas begins with a research field, time window, and institutional or geographic scope at intake. The corpus is pulled from OpenAlex (>200M works), Semantic Scholar, and the publisher-side bibliographic stacks relevant to the field; deduplication and field-of-study tagging follow.
Concept clustering runs on title-and-abstract semantics joined to citation co-citation structure so the atlas reasons about concept clusters rather than keyword groupings. Citation velocity time series are computed at the cluster level across the time window.
Institution-pair gap analysis joins the corpus to author-affiliation data. For each pair of producing institutions we compute topical similarity (cosine on cluster vectors) and observed co-authorship. The gap surface is the high-similarity, low-co-authorship pairs — the structural signal that program officers and vice provosts use to identify under-realized collaborations.
Funder concentration and country specialization are pulled from grant-acknowledgement parsing across the corpus and from the relevant funding-body APIs (NIH RePORTER, NSF Award Search, ERC, UKRI, Wellcome). Named-researcher influence ranking combines citation centrality, h-index trajectory, and affiliation movement.
A senior analyst — typically with field-specific training — reviews each layer before the atlas is drafted. The Counter-Signal Pass on a research field surfaces methodological pushback, replication-crisis flags, and citation-cartel risk for any named cluster the atlas centers.
The policy-grade methodology appendix documents every source, every join, and every analytical choice so the deliverable can be cited externally.
Counter-Signal Pass is included on every report. The full Foragentis methodology is documented in The State of AEO and GEO in 2026.
What this report does NOT do.
Procurement-grade reports scope themselves. The work below is adjacent and important — and is not in this SKU.
The Research Field Atlas is a structural map of public research output. Industrial R&D, classified work, and unpublished research are absent by construction. The atlas surfaces fields where this absence is material.
Author-affiliation data is messy in any open citation graph. Disambiguation runs at industry-best precision but is not perfect. Named-researcher influence rankings flag low-confidence cases.
Field-of-study tagging is a model-driven step. For interdisciplinary fields where the boundaries are themselves contested, the atlas reports the boundary choice it inherited and offers a sensitivity analysis on the boundary case.
What the engagement costs.
The Counter-Signal Pass — every thesis stress-tested against its strongest opposing case — is included on every report at no extra cost. See the Counter-Signal block on the catalog hub →
Methodology preview on request.
A redacted public sample for this SKU is in production. To preview the methodology now, email forintel@foragentis.com and we will send the methodology one-pager. The published methodology white paper — The State of AEO and GEO in 2026 — covers the underlying analytical framework.
About Foragentis.
Foragentis is an AI research and product company based in Sacramento, California. ForIntel is the business-intelligence research arm — producing custom dossiers across four buyer lanes: Search & AI Visibility, Markets & Locations, Capital & Innovation, and Specialty.
Every claim in a ForIntel report traces to a public source. Findings are re-verified before delivery. The Adversary/Analyst architecture pairs a senior analyst with a counter-signal pass on every thesis. Anything below our statistical thresholds is labeled directional rather than validated.
Methodology is documented in The State of AEO and GEO in 2026 — a 9,900-word, 42-page public study with effect-size statistics across four frontier AI engines.
Ready to scope this commission?
Intake takes under five minutes. We confirm scope, timeline, and cost within one business day.