Welcome to the Project Cosmos homepage.

The project was launched by Carbon Brief in June 2026 following an 18-month research and development effort.

The aim: to build the world’s largest database of climate change research.

Containing more than 1.8 million unique publications linked by 40 million citation relationships, the Cosmos database represents the most complete and expansive mapping of human knowledge on climate change ever assembled.

The articles and visuals below will guide you through how the Cosmos database was built, as well as all the subsequent analysis, including the Cosmos 500 rankings of most cited authors, publications and institutions.

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https://www.carbonbrief.org/project-cosmos/

The most highly cited publications in Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database reveal the building blocks supporting so many elements of climate science.

Every year, thousands of new scientific documents are published, from studies and reports to books and assessments.

Carbon Brief’s Project Cosmos pulls together the “universe” of climate research, spanning 1.8m publications from almost a century of scientific endeavor.

Research publications are linked through citations – where one study references others, perhaps using their methods, confirming their results or even challenging their findings.

The most influential publications are cited hundreds or even thousands of times, becoming cornerstones of their academic fields.

Carbon Brief has calculated a citation score for each individual publication by counting how many times it has been cited by other research in the Cosmos database.

Using these scores, Carbon Brief has created the Cosmos 500 ranking for the most highly cited climate publications.

(This ranking only counts references from within Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database. This is distinct from the citation count given by, for example, Google Scholar, which counts all the references a publication has ever received.)

The post Carbon Brief’s ranking of the most highly cited climate publications appeared first on Carbon Brief.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/carbon-briefs-ranking-of-the-most-highly-cited-climate-publications/

Carbon Brief’s Project Cosmos is the largest known database of climate change research, featuring more than 1.8m individual publications.

Every publication has a list of authors – the experts who carried out fieldwork, analysed data and drafted the document itself.

Hundreds of thousands of experts are listed as authors in these studies, books and reports.

Each publication also has a list of references – the other academic works on which the authors drew to develop their research.

Carbon Brief has calculated a citation score for each expert, by counting how many times their publications are referenced by others within the Cosmos database.

The Cosmos 500 ranking shows the most highly cited academics in Carbon Brief’s database, based on their citation score.

(This ranking only counts references from within Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database. This is distinct from the citation count given by, for example, Google Scholar, which counts all references the publication has ever received.)

The post Carbon Brief’s ranking of the most highly cited climate scientists appeared first on Carbon Brief.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/carbon-briefs-ranking-of-the-most-highly-cited-climate-scientists-2/