← Fellow Signal dashboardSourcing Radar

Sourcing Radar

The rest of the site answers what is happening at the frontier. This answers where to look next, which research communities to call into. Pick an emerging research area and get a sourcing packet: where the US research is concentrated and rising, why now, what is technically hard (the company-thesis territory), and how present Activate already is. Built from OpenAlex; institutions and areas only, deliberately not individuals.

Research areawhitespaceEnvironmental ScienceT10895
Why now
The field's share of publications is up ~2.38x over the past several years; the federal funding signal is unavailable (no clean keyword match); Activate is not yet in this space. Recurring bottlenecks: sensitivity, degradation, cost.
Where to look
US research-institution hotspots, scored by output × specialization × growth (not raw count)
1Rocky Mountain Research Stationgovernment · 41 papers since 2022 · ×1.3 growth
2United States Fish and Wildlife Servicegovernment · 38 papers since 2022 · ×1.7 growth
3University of Floridaeducation · 121 papers since 2022 · ×1.4 growth
4US Forest Servicegovernment · 77 papers since 2022 · ×0.8 growth
5Colorado State Universityeducation · 57 papers since 2022 · ×1.7 growth
6United States Department of Agriculturegovernment · 60 papers since 2022 · ×1.3 growth
7Yale Universityeducation · 54 papers since 2022 · ×2.6 growth
8United States Geological Surveygovernment · 72 papers since 2022 · ×0.7 growth
What's technically hard
Recurring constraint terms in a sample of 120 recent papers (most-cited), keyword-matched, the company-thesis territory
sensitivity3
e.g. “MaxEnt brings comparable results when the input data are being completed; Model parameterization of four species distribution models”
degradation2
e.g. “Identifying climate refugia for high‐elevation Alpine birds under current climate warming predictions”
cost2
e.g. “Treating gaps and biases in biodiversity data as a missing data problem”
yield2
reproducibility1
Signals
Research growth×2.38 share growth (vs ~7y ago)
Federal fundingunavailable (no clean keyword match)
Activate presencenot yet
Evidence quality
Topic matchby OpenAlex topic ID
US institution coveragestrong
Funding matchunavailable
Abstract coverage79% of sampled papers

A candidate surface for human curation, not a ranking to act on blindly. Institutions only, no individuals, and US-scoped (the global ranking points at institutions Activate doesn't recruit from). Hotspots cover universities, national labs, and academic medical centers, where pre-company research happens. OpenAlex topic-to-institution attribution is imperfect, so a recognizable institution is the signal; an unfamiliar one may be a tagging artifact. Bottleneck terms are keyword-matched.

Phase 1. The roadmap, including coauthor-network scouting and citation-velocity rising-author detection (gated on disambiguation rigor), is in the proposal. See the live data in the dashboard.