Show HN: Phdtree – create and search your academic genealogy | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Phdtree – create and search your academic genealogy

phdtree.org

23 pointsmende13 comments

To get more data, check out http://chemistry.library.nd.edu/resources/genealogy/physics/ http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ <--lots of Mathematicians.

You could probably figure out a way to take those data sets and incorporate them, as they're relatively complete and well researched.

I'm glad to see you allow for multiple advisors, as that seems to show up every now and then.

We're working on this side project which allows users to create & edit their academic genealogy. Essentially it is a wiki site powered by Django/Python. So far all the basic wiki functions like CRUD, tracking edit history, diff different versions, reverting back to previous version, search, etc are completed.

Would appreciate it if HN community can provide some feedback/comments/suggestions. Many thanks!

Great!

It would be nice if I could see the entire tree of ancestors at once.

I was just thinking the same, but then on a second thought, wouldn't that create a huge web of people inter-connected together that couldn't fit into one page? Maybe could use Ajax to dynamically expand the family tree as users scroll up or down

Cool goal - reminds me a bit of the graph of boards of directors which lets you see how the web of board members for major corporations are intertwined.

My first assumption was that you had scrapped University sites and/or tried mining LinkedIn and had already constructed a database of thousands of scholars and their academic genealogy. But from your comment that doesn't seem to be the case.

Thanks for the encouraging word. Yes, you're absolutely right, initial data were generated by data mining several other websites, but our goal is to build this database as a wiki such that anyone can correct errors, add more profiles, add more connections, etc.

My wife is a postdoc in neurotrauma so obviously I checked if she was in the system. She wasn't, so I added her and updated her boss's entry too. I pulled in the correct names for their positions from their linkedin profiles, so I figured I'd drop a comment putting forward that perhaps adding some kind of lookup (or at least link to) of people's linkedin details.

Nice idea. As a current PhD student I'm having fun filling in the gaps for those who have come before me.

Can you present some links for people in the database who have large academic trees? Everyone I'm searching for ends up being isolated so I don't know what a tree looks like on your website!

Thanks for your contribution. Try search "Nathan A. Baker"

Nice side project, but it seems there are a lot of duplicate profiles, just to name a few:

a search of "Albert Einstein" returned 3

Niels Bohr: 4

Stephen Hawking: 3

Richard Feynman: 2

Lennard Jones: 2

linus pauling: 2

Thanks for pointing it out, we're working on implementing a "merge profile" feature. Once completed, duplicate profiles can easily be merged into one.

What are you doing differently than the existing academic trees---neurotree, economicstree, etc (http://academictree.org) ?

Their UI is very difficult to use, we tried, but give up eventually. That's part of the reason we created phdtree.org. We believe we have a much better user experience and "wiki" support. Try phdtree.org, and let us know what you think.

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