Road to Research

Inspiration

Finding research opportunities can be difficult because information about professors is spread across university websites, research papers, grant databases, and lab pages. We wanted to make it easier for students to find professors whose research matches their interests and see useful information about them in one place.

What it does

Road to Research helps students search for professors by university, department, and recent research subfields.

For each professor, the platform shows their department, recent papers, research subfields from OpenAlex, grant information when available, and a hiring quote if the professor or lab has publicly stated that they are looking for students or researchers.

How we built it

We built Road to Research using Jac with a graph-based structure connecting universities, professors, papers, subfields, grants, and hiring information.

We first collect professors from official university faculty pages, including their name, department, faculty page, and publications when available.

We then search each professor on OpenAlex using their name and institution. If the faculty page includes a paper, we can also use that paper to help identify the correct OpenAlex author. Once matched, we save the OpenAlex Author ID and use it to collect recent papers and their research subfields.

For grants, we use connections between papers, awards, institutions, and investigators. For hiring information, we use an LLM to research public faculty and lab pages and return a hiring quote and source when one is available.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was figuring out a reliable workflow for finding professors and checking their identities.

At first, we considered searching directly by professor name. The problem was that many researchers can have the same or similar names, so it was difficult to know whether we had found the correct person.

We also considered starting from a university and searching its research output. That made professor identity easier, but created another problem: it became difficult to determine which papers and research subfields belonged to each individual professor.

Eventually, we combined the two approaches.

We first collect the professor list from the university itself, so we already know who currently works there and what department they belong to. Then we search each professor's name together with the institution on OpenAlex. When a publication is available on the faculty page, we can also use that paper as another identity check.

This gives us a much cleaner workflow: the university tells us who the professors are, and OpenAlex tells us which papers, subfields, and research records belong to them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a workflow that combines official university data, structured academic data, and AI-assisted research without relying entirely on one source.

Instead of asking an AI to guess who a professor is or classify every paper, we use university faculty pages for current professor information and OpenAlex for academic identities, publications, and research subfields.

We are also proud that Road to Research brings together information that students would normally have to search for separately, including professors, recent research, grants, and hiring opportunities.

What we learned

We learned that collecting academic data is not necessarily the hardest part. The harder problem is connecting information from different sources to the correct person.

We also learned that stable identifiers such as OpenAlex Author IDs, DOIs, ORCIDs, and institution IDs are much more reliable than repeatedly searching by names.

Finally, we learned that structured databases and AI are useful for different tasks. OpenAlex works well for publications and research metadata, while AI is more useful for researching unstructured information such as hiring statements on faculty and lab websites.

What's next for Road to Research

Next, we want to support more universities and automate more of the faculty-page collection process.

We also want to improve grant discovery, expand search and filtering by department and research subfield, and regularly update recent publications and hiring information.

In the future, Road to Research could become a broader platform for students looking for undergraduate research, graduate advisors, PhD opportunities, and research collaborations.

Built With

• jac
• mongodb