SotA Lens is an open-source toolkit for exploratory literature mapping through citation networks. It helps researchers move from a raw scholarly corpus to an inspectable graph, ranked signals, and a browser-based visual explorer that can be used before a formal scoping review, systematic mapping study, or state-of-the-art review is fully stabilised.

The project combines:

• a Python command-line pipeline for building citation-network datasets from article metadata;

• exports for Gephi and web-ready JSON artifacts;

• a static browser-based explorer that can load local CSV and GEXF files directly in the browser;

• a bundled Dynamic Projection-Mapping / Spatial Augmented Reality case study used as the running example in the paper;

• official SotA Lens artwork bundled in the website assets and surfaced in the public-facing materials.

• Website: https://diogogithub.github.io/sota-lens/

• Interactive tool: https://diogogithub.github.io/sota-lens/tool.html

• Repository: https://github.com/diogogithub/sota-lens

• Software archive DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19860899

• arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16333

• Preprint PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.16333

• JOSS manuscript: paper/paper.md — not currently under JOSS review

Formal evidence-synthesis frameworks such as PRISMA are essential once a review protocol is defined. In practice, however, many research projects begin earlier: the topic may still be broad, the vocabulary unstable, and the neighbouring communities only partially visible.

SotA Lens supports that upstream exploratory stage. Rather than replacing screening or critical review, it helps researchers understand the shape of a field by surfacing:

• influential and highly connected papers;
• recurring authors and subject clusters;
• community structure within a citation graph;
• promising subtopics and adjacent areas;
• candidate boundaries for a later formal review protocol.

SotA Lens can:

• ingest article metadata from CSV files;
• parse common reference-list encodings;
• normalise DOI-based identifiers;
• construct directed citation graphs with NetworkX;
• export .gexf files for Gephi;
• generate web-ready JSON datasets from CSV, GEXF, or GEXF enriched with CSV metadata;
• compute graph summaries, author rankings, subject-term rankings, and community summaries;
• provide a static browser explorer for local CSV/GEXF inspection.

All browser-side uploads are processed locally in the user's browser. The website does not upload user-selected files to a server.

sota-lens/
├── src/sota_lens/           Python package and CLI
├── tests/                   Pytest-based tests
├── website/                 Static GitHub Pages site
│   └── assets/              CSS, JavaScript, data, and SotA Lens artwork
├── paper/                   JOSS-ready manuscript and bibliography
├── docs/                    Supporting documentation
├── data/case-study/         Bundled DPM/SAR case-study corpus and graph artifacts
└── .github/workflows/       CI and GitHub Pages deployment

git clone https://github.com/diogogithub/sota-lens.git
cd sota-lens
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -U pip
python -m pip install -e ".[dev]"

Run the tests:

pytest

Build a citation graph and a web dataset from the bundled case study:

sota-lens build \
  --articles data/case-study/articles_full.csv \
  --out build/dpm-sar \
  --web-json build/dpm-sar/web-dataset.json

Inspect an existing graph:

sota-lens inspect data/case-study/graph.gexf

Convert a Gephi/GEXF graph into a browser dataset while preserving richer article metadata from CSV:

sota-lens web-data \
  --graph data/case-study/graph.gexf \
  --articles data/case-study/articles_full.csv \
  --out build/case-study-demo.json \
  --limit 500

The --articles argument is optional. Without it, web-data still reads the GEXF topology, but the browser dataset will only contain the metadata present inside the GEXF. With it, the output combines the GEXF graph/topology with the fuller CSV fields such as title, authors, subjects, year, URL, and depth.

The most useful input is a CSV with at least the following columns:

A minimal CSV can contain only doi, title, and references.

The static site in website/ is split into separate pages:

• index.html — public landing page;
• methodology.html — method framing and relation to review workflows;
• tool.html — interactive local-file explorer;
• publication.html — paper, citation, repository information.

The tool page opens empty by default. The bundled case study is loaded only if the user clicks Try paper case study or opens tool.html?demo=paper.

The included case study maps literature around Dynamic Projection-Mapping and Spatial Augmented Reality. In the underlying exploration, two broad seed queries produced 200 seed results and a citation graph with 2,198 publication nodes and 8,249 citation edges. The browser demo uses a reduced subset for responsiveness, while the repository includes the richer supporting artifacts in data/case-study/.

SotA Lens is distributed as open-source research software, archived through Zenodo, and accompanied by an arXiv methodology preprint.

• Software archive: 10.5281/zenodo.19860899.
• arXiv preprint: arXiv:2605.16333.
• Preprint PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.16333.
• JOSS: a JOSS-ready manuscript is available under paper/paper.md, but the project is not currently under JOSS review. The initial submission was procedurally rejected because JOSS currently requires a longer public open-development history for projects developed privately before public release. The repository will remain public while future work proceeds through public issues, pull requests, and releases.

If you use SotA Lens, please cite the Zenodo software archive:

@software{sotalens2026,
  author  = {Peralta Cordeiro, Diogo},
  title   = {SotA Lens: Citation-network mapping for exploratory state-of-the-art reviews},
  year    = {2026},
  version = {0.1.0},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.19860899},
  url     = {https://github.com/diogogithub/sota-lens},
  note    = {Computer software}
}

The extended methodology preprint can be cited as:

@misc{peraltacordeiro2026sotalenspreprint,
  author        = {Peralta Cordeiro, Diogo},
  title         = {SotA Lens: Citation-network mapping for exploratory state-of-the-art reviews},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2605.16333},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.DL},
  url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16333}
}

Contributions, issues, and suggestions are welcome. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

SotA Lens is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.