Introducing OpenAlex Mapper

Max Noichl & Andrea Loettgers

2025-04-02

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Introducing

OpenAlex Mapper

The workflow of OpenAlex Mapper
Singh et al. (2023) McInnes, Healy, and Melville (2018) De Bruin (2023)

https://m7n-openalex-mapper.hf.space

https://possible-life-project-openalex-mapper-strong-gpu.hf.space

Now, why is this useful for HPSS?

• Problem: Small samples, case studies – generalization, validation?
• Answers questions of the form “The Hopfield Model – where is it (really) a thing?”
• Involved quantitative methods ground qualitative investigation.

Model templates – Debates about model transfer in science, model templates as a structuring discipline.
Humphreys (2004) Knuuttila and Loettgers (2020)

Concepts – Distribution of concepts over large, interdisciplinary samples.
Malaterre, Chartier, and Lareau (2020)

Methods – Relevant for debates on machine learning in science, debates about theory free science.
Breiman (2001) Bzdok, Altman, and Krzywinski (2018) Andrews (n.d.)

Qualifications

• OpenAlex is not perfect
• Our method right now only considers English
• We’re limited to sources that include abstracts or good titles
• Various UMAP-issues.

Thank you!

Literature

Andrews, Mel. n.d. “The Devil in the Data: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal.”

Breiman, Leo. 2001. “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures.” Statistical Science 16 (3): 199–215. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2676681.

Bzdok, Danilo, Naomi Altman, and Martin Krzywinski. 2018. “Statistics Versus Machine Learning.” Nature Methods 15 (4): 233–34. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4642.

De Bruin, Jonathan. 2023. “PyAlex.”

Humphreys, Paul. 2004. Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method. Oxford University Press.

Knuuttila, Tarja, and Andrea Loettgers. 2020. “Magnetized Memories: Analogies and Templates in Model Transfer.” In Philosophical Perspectives on the Engineering Approach in Biology. Routledge.

Malaterre, Christophe, Jean-François Chartier, and Francis Lareau. 2020. “The Recipes of Philosophy of Science: Characterizing the Semantic Structure of Corpora by Means of Topic Associative Rules.” Plos One 15 (11): e0242353.

McInnes, Leland, John Healy, and James Melville. 2018. “UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction.” arXiv:1802.03426 [Cs, Stat], February. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426.

Singh, Amanpreet, Mike D’Arcy, Arman Cohan, Doug Downey, and Sergey Feldman. 2023. “SciRepEval: A Multi-Format Benchmark for Scientific Document Representations.” arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13308.