PLOS Cloud Explorer

PLOS Cloud Explorer is an experimental research tool developed at UC Berkeley’s School of Information to help scholars visually explore and analyze the vast corpus of PLOS (Public Library of Science) articles. By leveraging cloud-based text mining and interactive visualizations, the tool enables users to map research topics, identify thematic clusters, and trace relationships across thousands of open-access scientific papers. Although primarily a prototype rather than a continuously maintained platform, PLOS Cloud Explorer demonstrates how open-access literature can be transformed into navigable knowledge landscapes, supporting large-scale discovery and meta-research in the life sciences.