About the data

What is on the map

Every research paper published in Nuclear Fusion and Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion since 1960 that cites, or is cited by, another paper of these two journals. Titles, authors, years and references come from Crossref.

Not included: other journals (Physics of Plasmas, Journal of Nuclear Materials, Fusion Engineering and Design…), conference proceedings, reports and theses.

How the map is built

• Position. Papers that cite each other are pulled together. Topics that cite each other a lot sit near each other.
• Topics. Found automatically from the citation links (no keywords involved), then named from the words that set their titles apart. The names are approximate; the most-cited papers listed under each topic show what it really is.
• Colours. The topics are grouped by hand into four areas: core confinement and stability; edge, divertor and wall; heating, current drive and sources; alternative concepts and inertial fusion.
• Dot size. How often the paper is cited by papers in these two journals only. Older papers have had more time to be cited, and a paper cited mostly in other journals looks smaller than it is.
• Lines. Each paper is linked to its most-cited reference; open a paper to see all of its references and citations.

Abstracts and access

Abstracts are shown only when their licence allows it (open-access papers). For the others, “Read the paper” opens the publisher's page. “Open access” marks papers whose published version is under a Creative Commons licence (3,425 of the papers on the map).

The same library, for AI-assisted research

The open-access papers behind this map are also indexed page by page so that an AI assistant (Claude) can search and quote them. In tests on a random sample of 2025–26 papers, the assistant answered 93 % of exact questions correctly with this library, against 74 % with web search, and 100 % against 57 % for values printed in tables. Without either, it answered almost none. That assistant is not part of this website.