People and places

Where tardigrade research happens

We mapped every institution named on the tardigrade papers in our corpus since 2016. Poland stands out: its institutions appear on 756 of those paper–institution links, against 370 for the United States, the next country. Most come from groups in Poznań and Kraków, which are also where many of today's new species are named.

The 163 institutions with six or more tardigrade papers since 2016 in our OpenAlex corpus (156 located so far), circles sized by paper count; hover a circle for its name. A paper counts once for each institution on it. Places from OpenAlex's institution records.

Countries

Papers since 2016 summed over each country's institutions, so a paper written across two institutions in one country counts twice.

Poland756

United States370

Italy273

Japan238

Denmark201

France195

Czechia160

Germany115

Sweden107

United Kingdom84

Finland79

Russia79

Argentina69

China59

Portugal29

The most active institutions

	Institution	Where	Since 2016	All years
1	Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań	Poznan, Poland	230	313
2	Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals	Krakow, Poland	187	187
3	Jagiellonian University	Krakow, Poland	165	197
4	University of Modena and Reggio Emilia	Modena, Italy	110	217
5	University of Copenhagen	Copenhagen, Denmark	95	156
6	Natural History Museum Aarhus	Aarhus, Denmark	89	116
7	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Chapel Hill, United States	86	94
8	Keio University	Tokyo, Japan	68	77
9	University of Jyväskylä	Jyväskylä, Finland	62	66
10	Kristianstad University	Kristianstad, Sweden	53	69
11	University of Silesia in Katowice	Katowice, Poland	51	65
12	University of Gdańsk	Gdansk, Poland	51	53
13	Senckenberg am Meer	Wilhelmshaven, Germany	48	51
14	Institute of Plant Protection	Beijing, China	46	46
15	Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique	Paris, France	40	60
16	Zoological Institute	St Petersburg, Russia	40	49
17	Swedish Museum of Natural History	Stockholm, Sweden	37	51
18	University of Catania	Catania, Italy	34	82
19	Charles University	Prague, Czechia	29	33
20	The University of Tokyo	Tokyo, Japan	27	39
21	National Institutes of Natural Sciences	Tokyo, Japan	27	27
22	Keio University Shonan Fujisawa	Fujisawa, Japan	26	29
23	St Petersburg University	St Petersburg, Russia	26	26
24	Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas	Buenos Aires, Argentina	26	42
25	East Tennessee State University	Johnson City, United States	24	57
26	University of Kassel	Kassel, Germany	24	31
27	Institute of Soil Biology	České Budějovice, Czechia	24	30
28	Baker University	Baldwin City, United States	22	45
29	Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Animal Physiology and Genetics	Prague, Czechia	22	24
30	Harvard University	Cambridge, United States	22	40
31	University of Wyoming	Laramie, United States	21	21
32	Universidade do Porto	Porto, Portugal	20	33
33	National Research Council	Rome, Italy	20	21
34	Warren Wilson College	Asheville, United States	19	31
35	University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice	České Budějovice, Czechia	19	23
36	University of Milan	Milan, Italy	19	27
37	Czech Academy of Sciences, Biology Centre	České Budějovice, Czechia	19	22
38	Université Grenoble Alpes	Saint-Martin-d'Hères, France	19	19
39	The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI	Hayama, Japan	18	21
40	British Antarctic Survey	Cambridge, United Kingdom	18	57

Counts come from the works we collect for this project, found by searching for tardigrades in titles, abstracts and keywords, so they include some papers where tardigrades are one topic among several. The people behind these numbers, and what each group works on, are on the pages for their work: who names new species, genomes, development, cryptobiosis.

How this is built

Data: The institutions named on the tardigrade papers in our literature corpus, collected from OpenAlex by searching titles, abstracts and keywords for tardigrades. Places come from OpenAlex's institution records; the world outline from Natural Earth.
Built with: build_labs.py counts each paper once for each institution on it, keeps the institutions with six or more papers since 2016, sums them by country, and draws the map as SVG with circles scaled by the square root of the count.
Checked: By hand: one institution whose place lookup found a different organisation is left off the map. Not tested against data.
Limits: Affiliations are as OpenAlex matched them. Some counted papers treat tardigrades as one topic among several, and a paper counts twice in a country's total when two of its institutions are there. 7 institutions are not yet placed on the map.
More: How the whole project is built