ABDUL AZEEM ANSARI

TieTrace: who funds the experts journalists quote?

Graph Hacks/Oct 2026

Journalists often quote “independent” experts without knowing if the expert’s research is funded by the company in the story. That answer is spread across millions of papers, funders and co-author links, and nobody can check it by hand. TieTrace is an AI agent that checks how connected an expert is to a company, using an OpenAlex research graph in FalkorDB. Every tie comes with its paper DOI, and every “no tie found” comes with its scope: how many co-author hops, which years, and how much of the data records funders. It never calls anyone “independent” or “conflicted”; it says “ties found in the research record”. It is for investigative journalists, fact-checkers and editors. We tested it on a known case, where it found 4 of 4 publicly confirmed leaders of the Global Energy Balance Network (a Coca-Cola-funded group) with DOIs. Two cases are loaded: Coca-Cola × obesity and Philip Morris × lung cancer. We report our failed tests too: the Tier B and score tests failed, so only direct evidence (Tier A) is a finding.

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