Show HN: Phdtree – create and search your academic genealogy (opens in new tab)

We're working on this side project which allows users to create & edit their academic genealogy. Essentially it is a wiki site powered by Django/Python. So far all the basic wiki functions like CRUD, tracking edit history, diff different versions, reverting back to previous version, search, etc are completed.

Would appreciate it if HN community can provide some feedback/comments/suggestions. Many thanks!

Cool goal - reminds me a bit of the graph of boards of directors which lets you see how the web of board members for major corporations are intertwined.

My first assumption was that you had scrapped University sites and/or tried mining LinkedIn and had already constructed a database of thousands of scholars and their academic genealogy. But from your comment that doesn't seem to be the case.

Nice idea. As a current PhD student I'm having fun filling in the gaps for those who have come before me.

Can you present some links for people in the database who have large academic trees? Everyone I'm searching for ends up being isolated so I don't know what a tree looks like on your website!

Nice side project, but it seems there are a lot of duplicate profiles, just to name a few:

a search of "Albert Einstein" returned 3

Niels Bohr: 4

Stephen Hawking: 3

Richard Feynman: 2

Lennard Jones: 2

linus pauling: 2

What are you doing differently than the existing academic trees---neurotree, economicstree, etc (http://academictree.org) ?

To get more data, check out http://chemistry.library.nd.edu/resources/genealogy/physics/ http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ <--lots of Mathematicians.

You could probably figure out a way to take those data sets and incorporate them, as they're relatively complete and well researched.

I'm glad to see you allow for multiple advisors, as that seems to show up every now and then.

My wife is a postdoc in neurotrauma so obviously I checked if she was in the system. She wasn't, so I added her and updated her boss's entry too. I pulled in the correct names for their positions from their linkedin profiles, so I figured I'd drop a comment putting forward that perhaps adding some kind of lookup (or at least link to) of people's linkedin details.