Citation Explorer

Paste a paper (DOI or title) and see why it gets cited — the actual sentences where other papers reference it, distilled into the words, phrases and themes people use. Reasons you didn't expect often surface.

Why this is interesting
A citation count tells you how often your work is cited; this tells you why. Take our 2019 Nature Climate Change paper on how nitrogen and phosphorus limit the CO₂ fertilization of plant biomass. Reading the sentences where it is actually cited, most references are to the CO₂-fertilization estimate itself and to plant biomass — nitrogen shows up about three times more often than phosphorus, and a real slice cite the paper for its method rather than its finding. Angles the abstract never leads with. Click the example below to see it, or paste any DOI to do the same for your own work.
Try (top-cited lab papers): Terrer 2016, Science · Terrer 2021, Nature · Terrer 2019, Nat. Climate Change · Terrer 2018, New Phytol. · Ren 2024, Nat. Climate Change · Fleischer 2022, Glob. Change Biol. · Fricke 2025, PNAS · Bell 2023, Nat. Communications · Cambron 2025, Nat. Climate Change · Terrer 2017, Science
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Why it's cited — themes

Share of readable citing sentences that mention each theme (a sentence can hit several).

The language of your citations

Most-frequent meaningful words and multi-word phrases across the citing sentences (stopwords, generic filler and co-cited author names removed).

Words

Phrases

Citations per year

Is interest holding up? From OpenAlex, which indexes more citing works than the sentence data above. The current year is still in progress, so its bar is partial.

Where it's cited

Citing papers by the country of their authors' institutions — hover a country for its count. One paper can count for several countries.

Every citing sentence

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Citing sentences from the Semantic Scholar API; per-year counts and countries from OpenAlex. Only citing papers with open full text expose a sentence, so coverage is partial (often ~⅓). Author-name and theme filtering are heuristic. Designed by César Terrer with Claude Code.