# SCALE: Scientific Concept Aggregation via LLMs and Embeddings for Fine-Grained Taxonomy Extension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07254 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07254/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [SPECTER: Document-level Representation Learning using Citation-informed Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07180/) (2020)
- [From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08473/) (2018)
- [OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01833/) (2022)
- [SciRepEval: A Multi-Format Benchmark for Scientific Document Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13308/) (2022)
- [Growth rates of modern science: A bibliometric analysis based on the number of publications and cited references](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.4578/) (2014)
- [TaxoGen: Unsupervised Topic Taxonomy Construction by Adaptive Term Embedding and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09551/) (2018)
- [TaxoCom: Topic Taxonomy Completion with Hierarchical Discovery of Novel Topic Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06771/) (2022)
- [TaxoAdapt: Aligning LLM-Based Multidimensional Taxonomy Construction to Evolving Research Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10737/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ScholarStack: Layered Research Asset Orchestration and Cross-Task Reuse for Scientific Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23735/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The increasing specialization of scientific research challenges existing classification systems, which provide effective representations of broad disciplines and research topics but often fail to capture the fine-grained conceptual structure of contemporary science. Author keywords offer greater specificity, but their fragmentation, redundancy, and terminological variability limit their use as stable units of knowledge organization. We introduce SCALE (Scientific Concept Aggregation via LLMs and Embeddings), a framework that extends the OpenAlex taxonomy with a new level of scientific Concepts below Topics. Rather than treating keywords as isolated descriptors, SCALE organizes semantically related terms into coherent and interpretable conceptual units and integrates them within the existing disciplinary hierarchy. The framework combines scientific text embeddings, large language models, and graph-based community detection to construct this additional layer at scale. The resulting taxonomy enables scientific literature to be read through an intermediate conceptual level between broad research topics and individual documents. This perspective provides a more detailed representation of how scientific knowledge is structured, specialized, and connected across disciplines. By transforming heterogeneous author terminology into reusable hierarchical units, SCALE offers a foundation for fine-grained scholarly classification, scientometric analysis, research monitoring, and future ontology development.