Trending Research Papers Screensaver
The Trending Research Papers screensaver ranks real recent scholarly works by their real citation count. It is free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
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Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the Trending Research Papers screensaver works
The saver reads real recently-published works sorted by citation count from the OpenAlex API.
Each entry shows a real paper title, authors and real citation count.
The pipeline refreshes the board on its own schedule.
No key is required for this key-less public endpoint.
What OpenAlex catalogues
OpenAlex is an open index of scholarly works, authors, sources, institutions and topics, launched in January 2022 by the nonprofit OurResearch as a successor to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which stopped being updated at the end of 2021. Its records draw on sources including Crossref, DataCite and PubMed, and works are linked to the works that cite them. That makes it possible to rank recent papers by how often later work cites them.
The ranking lists recently published works sorted by their cited-by count, with the date and authors where available. Recent work can only collect citations from papers that appeared afterward, so the leaders are often widely used methods, tools and datasets and reference papers, not necessarily the most surprising discoveries. Citation habits also vary a great deal between fields, so counts are not comparable across them.
Because records are built automatically from metadata supplied by many publishers and repositories, large open indexes contain messy entries, and a citation count may merge references to different things. Counts also change as indexing catches up, so treat the board as a snapshot of the database, not a verdict on importance.
A worked example
A real paper with thousands of real citations sits at the top of the board, exactly matching OpenAlex's own count.
Settings & tips
- Titles, authors and citation counts are real OpenAlex records, not generated.
- Accent recolours the ranking bars.
- Coverage spans real works across all scholarly disciplines.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real research data?
- Yes — real scholarly-work records from the OpenAlex API.
- Is a key needed?
- No. OpenAlex's works API is fully key-less.
- How current is 'recent'?
- It reflects real works published within a recent rolling window, ranked by real citations.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.
- Why do very new papers rarely top the list?
- They have had little time to be cited, so a paper must be influential quickly to enter a recent-works ranking.
- Why might an odd entry, such as a journal title, appear instead of an article?
- Records are assembled automatically from metadata supplied by many sources, so some entries are incomplete or misattributed. Large open indexes inevitably contain a share of messy records.
- Do citation counts differ from Google Scholar?
- Usually, yes. Each index uses different sources and matching rules, so counts for the same paper rarely agree.