The Evidence Map
Two sciences.
One force plate.
Everything Vault Kinetics builds rests on a single measurement — the force your body puts into the ground. We mapped 280 of the papers that define that science and wired them by their real citations. Two dense clouds emerge — built on identical hardware, yet barely citing one another.
280papers mapped
237,609combined citations
104 / 176injury / performance papers
2,082real citations between them
1.8%of citations cross the two fields
What the map shows
Left — the clinical cloud (104 papers). Force plates, gait and plantar-pressure analysis used to predict ACL tears, forecast falls in the elderly, track Parkinson’s, and flag diabetic ulcers before they form.
Right — the performance cloud (176 papers). The very same hardware used to optimize power, sprint mechanics, jump readiness and fatigue in elite athletes. Each dot is a paper; bigger dots are more-cited, more influential work.
The faint steel web is 2,082 real citations. Almost all of them stay inside one cloud — only 1.8% (38 citations) cross between the fields. Those few are picked out in gold: the places the two sciences actually touch.
Why it matters for Vault
The instrument is identical; only the interpretation differs. Two enormous problem spaces — injury, aging and neurology on one side, athletic performance on the other — run on the same sensor and are kept apart only by who reads which journals.
Vault Kinetics productizes the shared core: one affordable force platform and an analytics layer that speaks both languages — putting lab-grade ground-reaction-force science into clinics, gyms, and living rooms at scale.
The gold threads — limb asymmetry, return-to-sport testing, load-and-injury — are where the fields already reach for each other. The day a clinician’s screen and a coach’s readiness test run on the same Vault data is the day these literatures converge.
Method — 60 hand-picked anchor papers, snowballed through the OpenAlex scholarly graph to their most-cited, most-connected neighbours (280 papers total). Every edge is a real citation: steel stays within a field, gold crosses between them. Dot size is total citations. Drag to explore; hover any dot for its title.