Exploratory, not prescriptive
SotA Lens helps discover neighbouring terms, subfields, influential works, and candidate clusters before the final review protocol is fixed.
Research software for exploratory evidence mapping
Map a scholarly field before narrowing the review.
SotA Lens turns scholarly metadata into citation networks, community summaries, and browser-ready visualisations for early-stage state-of-the-art, scoping, and systematic mapping reviews.
Complementary to PRISMA
The method supports upstream mapping and protocol design. It does not replace eligibility screening, critical appraisal, or transparent reporting.
Offline-friendly
The Python pipeline can run locally, and the web explorer reads CSV/GEXF files in the browser without uploading them.
Designed for public research workflows
SotA Lens is intended for researchers who need to understand a broad field before writing a focused state-of-the-art chapter, scoping review, or systematic mapping study.
The included case study maps literature around Dynamic Projection-Mapping and Spatial Augmented Reality, yielding a complete graph of 2,198 publication nodes and 8,249 citation edges.
What it produces
- Input
- CSV scholarly metadata
- Graph
- Directed citation network
- Export
- GEXF, JSON, summary tables
- Explorer
- Static local-file web tool