Who Can Introduce Me To...
Find a path to any researcher through people you've both worked with; up to 3 handshakes away.
Cold emails don't work. The only reliable way to reach someone you'd like to work with is through a personal introduction. In academia that person is almost always a co-author. This tool finds them: given two researchers, it traces a path through shared co-authorship
Why not all paths are equal.
A shared byline is not a relationship. To find introductions that are likely to still be warm, each co-authorship is scored on intimacy and recency. Intimacy is the inverse of author-list size (2/n): a two-person paper scores 1.0, a ten-person paper scores 0.2. This should capture the people who actually sat in a room together. The two factors combine into a single frecency score per link. The overall path warmness multiplies those scores across every hop and applies an additional penalty for each extra degree of separation, since a three-hop introduction is harder to land than a two-hop one regardless of how strong the individual links are.
Built on OpenAlex, running in your browser. The tool queries OpenAlex directly, which provides open, free access to a global acdemic knowledge graph with no API key and no paywall. Every query goes straight from your browser to their servers. There is no backend, no login, and no data passes through me. Running client-side means no infrastructure to pay for, no server to babysit, and no attack surface to worry about.
How this works.
The natural CS framing is a shortest-path problem, and the natural tools are Dijkstra's algorithm or A*; both beautiful and correct. They would find the globally optimal introduction chain. The catch is that they need to exhaustively traverse the graph around both endpoints before committing to a path, which in practice means fetching potentially thousands of co-author lists from the OpenAlex API and hitting the rate limits before a result appears.
The browser constraint forces a better question: not what is the optimal path? but what is a warm path I can find without exhaustive search? It turns out this is greedy bidirectional BFS search. The algorithm expands simultaneously from both ends. It pullis co-authors of both you and your target into a single shared pool. At each step traverses the warmest relationship available from either side. The moment the two expanding frontiers touch, the search stops. This path may not be the warmest overall (it is greedy after all), but it is an actionable chain you can get quickly.
A few caveats.
The search only retrieves a researcher's 100 most recent papers, so very old collaborations may not be visible at all. This also means it is not computing your Erdős number.
Runs entirely in your browser.
As mentioned above. There is no server and no data is sent to me. Every query goes directly from your browser to OpenAlex. Many thanks for providing this valuable public good.