Institutional Affiliation Tracker Free & Online

See which institutions dominate a set of papers.

What this tool does

This tool counts authors per institution from a simple list. You paste one author per line in the format author, vertical bar, affiliation, and the tool counts how many authors belong to each institution and ranks them. For a literature review, that ranking answers a useful question: is this field spread across many institutions, or does a small cluster of places produce most of the work?

It works fully in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, and you do not need an account. Paste your text, press the button, and read the result on the same page. That makes it useful for students, researchers, and anyone who has to get through a long paper quickly without losing the important parts.

How to use it

List the authors of the papers you are reviewing, one per line, with each author’s institution after a vertical bar. Press the count button and read the ranked table from the top. If one institution dominates, check whether its authors also dominate the citations, because concentration of authorship and concentration of influence often travel together.

Worked example

Three lines, Smith and Lee both at Oxford University and Garcia at MIT, produce a table with Oxford at two authors and MIT at one. The pattern is small here, but across fifty papers the same table reveals whether a review is really a field survey or mostly the output of two or three labs.

How to read the results

The output is a ranked table of institutions with author counts, plus a total author count. Institutions are sorted from most to fewest authors, and identical spellings are counted together, so write institution names consistently or the same place will split into two rows.

Do not treat the output as a final answer. It is a starting point for your own reading. Skim the highlighted parts first, then read the full passage around anything that matters for your work. A tool can point at the likely important sentences, but only you can judge whether they are actually important for your question.

Honest limits

The tool counts only what you type, and it counts authors, not papers, influence, or quality: an institution with many co-authors on one paper looks larger than an institution with one author on many papers. It cannot resolve name variants, such as Oxford versus University of Oxford, and it cannot verify any affiliation. Standardise names before pasting for a clean count.

This tool does not use artificial intelligence, and it does not understand your paper the way a human reader does. It follows fixed rules that you can inspect in the results. That is a strength when you want transparent, repeatable results, and a weakness when a passage needs real understanding, context, or judgement.

Tips for best results

Paste clean text. Remove page headers, footers, and reference lists before you paste, because they add noise to word counts and sentence scores. Work on one section at a time for long papers, and keep your original file open beside the tool so you can check anything surprising against the source. If you use the result in your own writing, always cite the original paper, never the tool output.

Frequently asked questions

Is it free? Yes. The tool is free to use online, with no sign-up and no download.

Is my text stored anywhere? No. Everything runs in your browser tab. Closing the tab removes your pasted text.

Can I trust the output completely? No tool of this kind should be trusted blindly. Use it to speed up reading and checking, then verify the important claims yourself in the original text.

Embed this tool on your website — free

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