What is Research Intensity?

Live index · updated daily

Research Intensity is a live measure of how much of the world's current scientific attention is focused on a topic right now. elements-live tracks it for all 118 elements — blending live publication volume (how many papers are coming out) with citation activity (how much impact they're having), weighted toward what's recent — so a rising research trend shows up in weeks, not years after the fact.

What it measures

Most research-trend tools work off historical citation counts alone, which rewards what a field already cited years ago more than what it's actually reading now. Research Intensity is built to answer a different question: what is science paying attention to today — which fields are accelerating, which are cooling, and which papers are driving that movement, element by element.

Reading the numbers

Every number on an element or subject page uses the same handful of terms, defined the same way everywhere they appear:

RIS — Research Intensity Score
How much of the world's current scientific attention this element holds, 0 to 1. It's relative — 1.00 is whatever leads today.
HRI — Historical Research Intensity
How today's activity compares to this element's own all-time peak. 1.00 means it's never been more active than right now.
Rank
Where this element sits among all 118, right now.
Velocity
How fast the score is moving year over year. A rising arrow means attention is accelerating, not just high.
Citation clusters
Groups of papers that cite each other, reconstructed from the live citation graph. They show why an element's research is moving, not just that it is — the closest thing on the site to a citation network view of a field.
Co-cited
The element that most often appears alongside this one in the same research — the strongest edge in that element's part of the citation network.
Percentile
How a paper's citation impact compares to its peers — "top 1%" means only 1 in 100 papers is cited more.

Where the data comes from

elements-live draws on live publication and citation data from Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, CrossRef, and CORE, rebuilt from a fresh snapshot every day. Most scholarly databases don't organize papers by chemical element — we do. That element-by-element organization is what makes a research intensity index possible at all, rather than a generic publication-count dashboard.

Frequently asked questions

How is Research Intensity different from a raw citation count or an h-index?

A citation count or h-index describes a paper or a researcher's lifetime record. Research Intensity describes a topic's momentum right now — it moves week to week as new papers and citations arrive, so it tracks what science is paying attention to today, not just what it has cited historically.

What's the difference between RIS and HRI?

RIS is relative to every other element right now — 1.00 is whatever leads today. HRI is relative to that same element's own all-time peak — 1.00 means it has never been more active than right now. RIS answers "who's hot today"; HRI answers "is this hot for them."

How often does the data update?

The live index is rebuilt from a daily snapshot of publication and citation data, so scores, rank, and velocity move as the literature does — not on a slower manual schedule.

Want the fuller story — why timing matters more than raw citation counts, and how RIS and HRI catch different things? Read the full methodology piece →

Ready to see it live? Open the table or jump straight to any of the 118 elements.

Founders & story — coming soon

The people building elements-live will get their own space here soon.