Open-source infrastructure for structural citation analysis
This ecosystem hosts the tools behind the Citation-Constellation project — a system for decomposing researcher citation profiles by network proximity, revealing where in the social graph citations originate.
pulsar 🌟 → astrolabe 🔭 → citation-constellation ✨
(the signal) (the instrument) (the map)
| Repo | What it does | Status |
|---|---|---|
| citation-constellation | BARON & HEROCON scoring engine. Multi-phase citation network decomposition with CLI and no-code Gradio web interface. | ✅ Phases 1–3 complete |
| citation-pulsar-helm | Helm chart for deploying a local LLM on Kubernetes via llama.cpp. Provides the inference engine for venue governance extraction. | 🔧 In development |
| citation-astrolabe | Venue governance database. Scrapes editorial boards, extracts structured data via Pulsar's LLM, resolves entities against OpenAlex. | 🔧 In development |
The three repositories form a pipeline:
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Pulsar deploys a quantized language model (Qwen 3.5 8B) as an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint on Kubernetes — the steady signal that powers everything downstream.
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Astrolabe consumes that signal to scrape venue editorial board pages, extract structured governance data (member names, roles, institutions, ORCIDs), resolve entities against OpenAlex author profiles, and store the results in a persistent, incrementally growing database — the instrument that maps the scholarly sky.
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Citation-Constellation reads Astrolabe's database to classify citations flowing through venues where a researcher or their network holds governance roles, adding venue governance detection (Phase 4) to its existing self-citation, co-authorship, and affiliation layers — the map of a researcher's citation constellation.
All tools in this ecosystem measure citation network structure — where in the social graph citations originate — not research quality, impact, or integrity.
In-group citation is normal and often appropriate. These scores should not be used for hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.
The Citation-Constellation web interface is freely available — no installation, no registration, no payment:
citation-constellation.serve.scilifelab.se
For the full methodology, conceptual foundations, tool landscape comparison, discussion of responsible research assessment alignment, and detailed limitations analysis, see the accompanying research paper:
Mahbub Ul Alam. Where do your citations come from? Citation-Constellation: A free, open-source, no-code, and auditable tool for citation network decomposition with complementary BARON and HEROCON scores, 2026. URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24216, arXiv:2603.24216, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2603.24216.
The paper is also available embedded within the web tool under the Full Research Paper tab.
@misc{alam2026citationconstellation,
title={Where Do Your Citations Come From? {C}itation-{C}onstellation: A Free, Open-Source, No-Code, and Auditable Tool for Citation Network Decomposition with Complementary {BARON} and {HEROCON} Scores},
author={Mahbub Ul Alam},
year={2026},
eprint={2603.24216},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.DL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24216},
doi={10.48550/arXiv.2603.24216}
}Powered by OpenAlex, ORCID, and ROR.
MIT
