Frontier Graph

Frontier Graph is an open-source research tool for browsing suggested questions in economics from a literature graph.

• Website: frontiergraph.com
• Working paper: frontiergraph.com/paper/
• Downloads: frontiergraph.com/downloads/
• Repository: github.com/prashgarg/frontiergraph

Public beta. This repository powers the public website, the release bundle, and the working paper. The maintained public surfaces are site/ and the release/export pipeline. The legacy Streamlit app in app/ is kept in the repo as deprecated code for possible revival later. Some analysis scripts remain exploratory research code rather than stable public APIs.

What Frontier Graph does

Frontier Graph surfaces plausible next questions from missing links in the literature, then lets you inspect the nearby topics, supporting paths, and starter papers behind each suggestion.

This repository contains:

• the public Astro website in site/
• the deprecated Streamlit app in app/
• the ranking and data logic in src/
• release and export scripts in scripts/
• the paper sources in paper/
• a small demo dataset in data/demo/

Quickstart

Install the Python package

python -m pip install -e '.[dev]'

This installs the frontiergraph CLI. The legacy economics-ranker alias still works.

Run the website locally

npm --prefix site install
npm --prefix site run dev

Run the deprecated app locally

If you already have the public SQLite bundle in data/production/frontiergraph_public_release/frontiergraph-economics-public.db, this is enough:

frontiergraph --headless

Or point the app at an explicit database path:

frontiergraph --db /path/to/frontiergraph-economics-public.db --headless

Public release workflow

The public website and the archived app share one canonical public release bundle. A typical refresh sequence is:

PYTHONPATH=. python scripts/export_site_data_v2.py
python scripts/build_frontiergraph_public_release_bundle.py
PYTHONPATH=. python scripts/export_site_data_v2.py

This updates the generated site data, paper assets, and public download metadata.

If you want the website to point at a live public database mirror, set:

export FRONTIERGRAPH_PUBLIC_DB_URL="https://..."

before running the export.

Reproducibility and scope

Frontier Graph is a research codebase, not a polished library package. The public repository is intended to make the method, release pipeline, website, deprecated app code, and paper inspectable.

• The public site can be reproduced from this repo plus the public release bundle.
• The deprecated app can still be run locally from this repo if you want to inspect the old workflow.
• The demo path is reproducible from the repo alone.
• Full economics rebuilds depend on external corpora, API access, and deployment infrastructure that are not all bundled into Git.

See docs/REPRODUCIBILITY.md for the full breakdown and docs/REPO_MAP.md for a guide to the repo layout.

Contribution model

Issues are welcome. Small pull requests are welcome too, especially for bugs, docs, or usability fixes. For larger changes, please open an issue first so we can agree on the shape before code is written.

See:

• CONTRIBUTING.md
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
• SECURITY.md
• SUPPORT.md

Data, paper, and citation

• Data packaging: DATA_README.md
• Data provenance: DATA_PROVENANCE.md
• Deployment notes: deploy/PUBLIC_RELEASE.md
• Citation: CITATION.cff
• License: LICENSE