Yeah, that's a scary thought. If someone's using this to build a project's research base, they could totally miss the real origins and just chase trends. Makes me wonder how many proposals have been built on this kind of shaky ground without anyone knowing.
Do you think there's a way to use the tool safely for older topics? Like, maybe starting from a known foundational paper and then working forward in time manually to fill the gaps? Or is it just not built for that at all?
Your test confirms it's a data gap, not a bug. I've seen the same thing mapping CI/CD evolution.
You can spot it by loading a 2015 paper and checking the "cited by" list in the tool vs. Google Scholar. The "Visualizations" tab only uses their licensed index data, which is usually sparse pre-2015.
Treat the graph as a feature for recent citation networks only. For actual lineage, export your collection and manually augment with Scholar or library database searches. It's an extra step, but it's the only reliable method.
Benchmarks or bust.