Evidence, not brochures.
You're committing years of your life to a graduate program. OpenRLens gives you signals on the three things that actually matter — from the published record.
Research Environment
Independence, stability, focus, and depth of the lab
Funding Health
Who secures grants, leads them, and whether funding aligns with core research
Mentorship & Gender
New researcher induction rate and estimated gender balance — indicative only
What You Get
13 signals. Plain language. No black boxes.
Research Environment · 5 scored + 1 informational
Research Independence
Does the lab lead its own work, or mostly support others?
Author Continuity
Are there researchers who stay and build over multiple years?
Output Stability
Does the program publish consistently, year after year?
Thematic Continuity
Does the department maintain a focused research identity?
Collaboration Balance
Is output dangerously dependent on a few external partners?
Research Concentration ↗
How concentrated is citation impact across the author pool? (informational)
Funding Health · 5 scored
Funding Presence
How much of the research acknowledges external funding?
Funding Leadership
On funded papers, does this institution lead — or just appear?
Funding–Theme Alignment
Is the funded work in the same area as the core program?
External Funding Anchoring
How much funded work is actually led by other institutions?
Funding Dependency Differential
Is the institution more confident leading funded or unfunded work?
Mentorship & Gender · 2 informational
Mentorship Diversity Index
Are new researchers being inducted into the program over time?
Gender Balance Index
Estimated gender balance among first authors — name-based, indicative only.
Comparing two programs?
Put up to three institutions side by side on all signals, with auto-generated plain-English insights on the key differences.
How It Works
Discover. Then verify.
Step 1 — Discover
Find institutions active in your research area
Search by concept. See which institutions worldwide are publishing and leading funded work. Build your shortlist.
Step 2 — Analyse
Verify the depth behind the activity
Run 13 deep signals on any institution. Some that look strong in Discover will reveal structural weaknesses here. That's the point.
Privacy
No account. No cookies. No tracking.
Anonymised visit count
IP is one-way hashed with a server salt. Raw IP never stored.
Institution search counts
Powers the usage stats on this page. Tied to your anonymised ID only.
No cookies or tracking scripts
No third-party analytics, no ads, no remarketing.
No account required
Everything works without sign-up. No email needed for standard analysis.
Usage
OpenRLens by the numbers
Limitations
What we cannot tell you
We measure research output patterns — not teaching quality, student outcomes, advisor relationships, or campus culture.
Funding signals are lower bounds. Open APIs underreport acknowledgements — more papers have funding than we can detect.
Gender Balance Index is name-based and indicative only. It does not reflect self-identified gender.
A disabled signal means insufficient data for that metric — not that the program is weak.
OpenAlex author disambiguation is imperfect. Confidence levels reflect this uncertainty.