Overview
Academic discovery often centers on people and organizations: which scholars specialize in a field, which journals publish their work, and which institutions host leading teams. Keenious lets you search directly for Authors, Venues, and Institutions alongside publications.
You can search in two ways across any entity lane:
Topic discovery: Enter research concepts or questions (such as perovskite solar cells or crispr off-target effects) to identify leading scholars, dedicated journals, and top institutions active in that domain.
Direct lookup: Enter an author name, journal title, or university name to locate their profile directly and inspect their publication record.
To switch modes, select Publications, Authors, Venues, or Institutions beneath the search bar. The same query terms and active filters are preserved as you switch between lanes.
The Evidence Model and Match Counts
When you search for entities by topic, Keenious uses an evidence model. It first retrieves the publications in the curated index that match your query by meaning and keywords, and then aggregates those publications to credit their respective authors, publishing venues, and affiliated institutions.
Publications matching your query form an evidence pool that credits and ranks related authors, venues, and institutions.
Every result card displays a matches metric alongside the entity's total career publications:
Metric | What It Measures |
Matches | The number of publications matching your specific search query that are credited to this entity. For example, a scholar with 250 career publications might show 14 matches on a search for CRISPR delivery vectors, reflecting their 14 papers on that specific topic. |
Publications | The total number of publications by that author, venue, or institution indexed across the entire Keenious catalog. |
Entities rank by their volume of matching publications, the semantic closeness of those papers, citation metrics, and direct name matches. For complete details on how search queries match and rank literature, see How Search Works in Keenious.
Refining Results: Scope, Sorting, and Filters
Scope sets the relevance floor for the underlying publications evidence pool:
Focused (1 segment): Requires high semantic similarity across supporting publications. This isolates domain specialists whose publications concentrate strictly on the topic.
Balanced (2 segments, default): Balances topical precision with coverage.
Exploratory (3 segments): Relaxes the floor to include peripheral and interdisciplinary contributors.
All (4 segments): Removes the floor, crediting entities across all retrieved candidates.
For a detailed breakdown of relevance floors, candidate pools, and how Scope safeguards citation sorting, see Controlling Search Scope and Relevance Floors.
Sort controls the ordering of entity cards:
Best match: Orders by combined topic relevance and scholarly cues (default for topic queries).
Most cited: Orders by total citations across the curated index.
Most publications: Orders by total indexed publications.
Filters apply at two distinct levels:
Filter Level | What It Constrains | Examples |
Entity filters | The entity's permanent catalog profile. | Author h-index, primary affiliated institution, venue publishing country, or institution type. |
Publication filters | The specific publications contributing evidence to the search. | Publication year (e.g. 2022 to present), open access status, or peer-reviewed status. |
To restrict venue results strictly to peer-reviewed academic journals rather than preprint repositories (such as arXiv or bioRxiv), set the venue Type filter to Journal.
Inspecting Profiles and Traversing Connections
Selecting any card opens a detailed profile panel on the right side of the screen. This panel provides an evaluation hub for the researcher, journal, or institution:
Scholarly metrics: Displays total citations, publication volume, and h-index (for authors).
Indexed publications: Lists the entity's articles, pre-sorted by relevance to your search query so the exact supporting papers appear first.
Venue quality badges: Identifies journals recognized by the Norwegian Scientific Index (Level 1 or Level 2) and Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
Pivoting across entities: Dedicated buttons let you jump across related scholarly dimensions:
Pivot buttons connect authors, venues, and institutions, allowing you to traverse research networks.
Selecting a pivot button launches a new search pre-filtered to that entity (for example, finding all frequent co-authors of a researcher, or all journals where a university publishes).
Spatial and Conversational Discovery
The Search Map: Switch to the map view to visualize authors, venues, and institutions clustered by conceptual similarity. Proximity reflects shared research topics, point size reflects total citations, and colored groupings represent distinct research areas. For an overview of navigating the visual workspace, see The Search Map: A Visual View of Your Results.
Entity Discovery in Chat: You can discover entities conversationally in Chat (e.g. "Which research groups specialize in perovskite degradation?"). Clicking any entity link in Chat opens its detail panel in the workspace, keeping the profile in context for follow-up questions.
Practical Research Workflows
Finding Peer Reviewers or Collaborators: Set mode to Authors, enter your specific topic, switch Scope to Focused to filter out broad generalists, and sort by Most cited or filter by h-index to locate active specialists.
Vetting Target Journals: Set mode to Venues, enter key terms from your manuscript, filter by Peer-reviewed under the Norwegian Scientific Index (NSI), and sort by Best match to discover journals actively publishing related articles.
Mapping Institutional Strengths: Set mode to Institutions, enter a field, and sort by Most publications or Best match. Use the detail panel to inspect affiliated researchers and preferred publishing outlets.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are citation counts or h-indexes lower than in Google Scholar or Scopus?
Metrics are calculated exclusively from publications in the Keenious curated index, which excludes non-peer-reviewed materials and unverified web documents.
Why does an author with known publications in a field not appear in topic results?
Keenious matches searches against publication titles and abstracts rather than full text. If an author's papers do not mention the topic concepts in their title or abstract, they will not match a topic search. Setting Scope to Exploratory or All, or searching directly for the author's name, retrieves their record.
How are author profiles created and disambiguated?
Profiles are sourced from OpenAlex, which applies algorithmic name disambiguation based on co-authorship networks, affiliations, and citation patterns.