After 18 months of R&D, Carbon Brief launched Project Cosmos — a citation-linked database of more than 1.8 million climate publications, with Cosmos 500 rankings of highly cited authors, papers, and institutions.
Project Cosmos: Carbon Brief's Database of Climate Change Research
Project Cosmos: Carbon Brief’s Database of Climate Change Research
In June 2026, Carbon Brief launched Project Cosmos — a major effort to map the scholarly literature that underpins climate science. After more than 18 months of research and development with specialist academic partners, the project presents what Carbon Brief describes as the world’s largest dedicated database of climate change research.
The database contains more than 1.8 million unique publications linked by 40 million citation relationships, with interactive exploration of topic clusters, citation networks, and rankings.
This is Carbon Brief’s project, not ours: a substantial piece of open research infrastructure for anyone working with climate evidence, citation networks, or science communication.
What Project Cosmos Is
Cosmos starts from a practical problem: climate knowledge is vast, fragmented across journals and decades, and hard to navigate as a single connected field. Carbon Brief’s approach uses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) corpus as a foundation.
IPCC working-group and special reports reference more than 100,000 unique studies, books, and reports. Cosmos expands outward from that core — via second-order references, publications that cite IPCC reports, and a curated set of climate-focused journals — so that included works are connected to the IPCC-linked literature by citation pathways.
How the Database Was Built
According to Carbon Brief’s methodology:
- Extract IPCC references from major assessment and special reports (excluding synthesis reports that largely repeat the same citations, and excluding niche methodology reports).
- Resolve metadata with OpenAlex — titles, DOIs, years, authors, and institutional affiliations at time of publication.
- Expand the network with second-order references and “IPCC citers” (papers that cite IPCC reports or chapters), plus articles from 22 climate-focused journals through 31 December 2025.
- Store and analyse: a MongoDB “raw” repository feeds a Neo4j graph database designed for highly connected citation data.
The computational science work that produced the final Neo4j database was led by Dr Tristan Cann at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Climate Change Communications and Data Science (C3DS), with support from Prof Travis Coan, and with contributions from Félix Chavelli at Inria in Paris. On the Carbon Brief side, editor Leo Hickman and the science and visuals teams led the public launch.
What You Can Explore
The public Cosmos homepage currently surfaces:
- Interactive mapping of the citation “universe” of climate research
- Cosmos 500 rankings of highly cited authors, publications, and institutions
- Methodology documentation explaining construction choices and limitations
- Interviews with highly cited researchers (for example Philippe Ciais and Detlef van Vuuren)
Over time, Carbon Brief positions the database as a way to track how interest in subfields evolves and to spot potential knowledge gaps — with research proposals invited via cosmos@carbonbrief.org.
Who It Is For
- Researchers mapping literatures, citation influence, or institutional networks in climate science
- Journalists and science communicators seeking structured overviews of highly cited work and authors
- Policy and analysis teams who need a citation-grounded view of the evidence base behind IPCC assessments
- Bibliometrics and open-science practitioners interested in IPCC-centred corpus construction with OpenAlex and graph databases
How to Use It
- Open the Project Cosmos homepage
- Read the methodology before drawing strong conclusions from rankings
- Explore the interactive map and Cosmos 500 author, publication, and institution rankings
- Contact Carbon Brief (cosmos@carbonbrief.org) if you have a research proposal that would use the database
Official Resources
Related
- IPCC Interactive Atlas — Explore IPCC climate projections interactively
- WRI Data Explorer — Open climate and environmental datasets
- Climate and Political Fact-Checking Collaboration — Connecting claims to scientific evidence
- NLP4Climate Community — Research community around climate NLP and evidence tools