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.

The post Project Cosmos appeared first on Carbon Brief.

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

This is the vast “cosmos” of academic literature and evidence that underpins humanity’s knowledge of climate change.

Every “star” – all 1.8m of them – represents one of the studies inside Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database.

The coloured “nebulae” and “galaxies” within this cosmos illustrate where clusters of studies share similar citations and, hence, areas of common academic focus.

The post Mapped: Inside Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database of 1.8 million climate studies appeared first on Carbon Brief.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-inside-carbon-briefs-cosmos-database-of-1-8-million-climate-studies/

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/