subfield
Transforming data into insights for the future of academia.
Read moreWhat Subfield Is
Subfield is the data layer underneath the questions every dean, program officer, and journalist eventually asks. Who works where, in what field, at what stage of career. The shape of any department, the makeup of any subdiscipline, the distribution of expertise across institutions and regions of the country.
For two decades these questions have been answered case-by-case, by hand, by people who could only see the slice of the data they happened to have. Subfield turns the slice into the whole.
The Canadian Academic Registry 2023 indexes every full-time faculty member at 87 accredited Canadian universities — every PhD-granting institution covered. 85,000 unique academics, 102,000 records. The 2026 collection is in progress; annual refresh is the going-forward cadence. The US Registry is in active build, targeting a 2027 release. A global registry of accredited institutions is the long horizon.
01
Every full-time faculty member, individually indexed. Other academic data products buy or scrape aggregates from third parties — university self-reports, government summaries. We collect at the record level, by hand and by pipeline, and the data is queryable down to the department.
02
No third-party data licenses limiting what we can publish or who we can sell to. The collection apparatus is ours — Python, Postgres, NLP, image pipelines, manual review. Every cleaned field shadows a raw one. Auditable end to end.
03
The variable nobody else collects: each faculty member's degree-granting institution mapped to their current employer. That's not a directory — that's a placement map. Where every institution's PhDs are landing. Which universities punch above their weight in global hiring. Which departments are quietly outperforming their reputations.
85,000
Unique Canadian academics
102,000
Registry records
87
Accredited Canadian universities · ROR-mapped
2023
Latest release · 2026 in collection
Inside the Registry
Each record is a structured profile — institutionally identified, taxonomically classified, biographically traced. Built so the questions worth asking can actually be answered.
Affiliation
87 accredited Canadian universities — every PhD-granting institution covered, all ROR-identified, every department mapped to its Statistics Canada CIP code. The US Registry is in active build — same standards from day one, interoperable on release.
Position
144 unique rank variants across Canadian institutions, collapsed into 7 master levels — with a fine-grained taxonomy that preserves visiting, sabbatical, sessional, and fellowship. The distribution of non-tenured staff across the country is a query, not a research project.
Placement
The unique signal nobody else collects: each faculty member's degree-granting institutions mapped to their current employer, both ROR-identified. Up to nine degrees per record. This is what turns a directory into a placement map.
The Pilot · Coming Q4 2026
The launch product is an investigative dashboard built directly on the Registry. A curated front door for casual visitors, a deeper exploration tool for serious users — and clicking from one to the other passes the context along, so a tile in the Atlas opens in Explore with its filters preset.
Atlas · Read-only
Each tile pairs a sourced finding with the chart that proves it. Which institutions place the most PhDs into Canadian Sociology faculty positions. How gender composition has shifted in Engineering over a decade. The rate at which universities hire their own PhDs — and the ones that quietly avoid it. Read the headline, study the data, download the chart for your slide deck.
Explore · Self-directed
Pick a university, a field, a CIP code, a rank, a year. Charts and tables update in tandem. Drill into a single department, compare two institutions, slice by graduate cohort or hire decade. Save your view, share it via URL, export the underlying data.
In Development · Academic Labor Market Rankings
Most rankings reward prestige and reputation. Subfield rankings show what actually happens in the academic labor market — who places where, who climbs to senior rank, who hires across the spectrum, and who hires their own.
The visible. The familiar.
Prestige · Reputation · Citations · Selectivity
The depth. The real story.
Where each institution's PhDs actually land — beyond just the headline destinations.
Smaller institutions outpacing the giants in placement — and departments whose hiring reaches across the academic spectrum.
Which institutions hire their own PhDs, and at what rate.
The most gender-diverse departments and universities.
Institutions that quietly over- or under-perform their reputations.
Roadmap
Subfield ships in waves. Public open-data first, conversational pilot second, full GA and API third. Below: where we are and what comes next.
A live preview of Atlas and Explore, running over Canadian U15 placement records. Open to anyone — explore the same investigative surfaces the Registry will ship behind, ahead of release.
The 2026 Canadian refresh is finalizing now; data for the inaugural US Registry is being collected in parallel for a 2027 release. New graduates, new hires, departures, and rank changes all picked up since the 2023 Canadian snapshot.
Subfield's flagship release. 85,000 unique full-time faculty across 87 accredited Canadian universities, 102,000 registry records, indexed by department, field, institution, rank, and stage of career.
The flagship analyst surface — curated insight tiles in the Atlas, deeper filter-driven views in Explore — both running over the full Registry.
The 2026 refresh ships once collection completes. Annual cadence begins for Canada from this release forward.
First US release. Same standards applied — ROR, CIP codes, standardized rank — interoperable with the Canadian Registry from day one. US cadence locks in once the collection rhythm proves out.
Programmatic access for developers. Pre-priced reports for non-technical buyers — Field Briefs, Institutional Snapshots, Peer Benchmarks. Comparative coverage in selected partner countries.
A natural-language interface over the Registry data — same safe-aggregate model, queries phrased in plain English. Held until the guardrails are battle-tested and hallucinations are rare. Date locks in once the testing earns it.
Use Cases
Subfield is built around four audiences. Different workflows, same underlying data, attribution-grade sourcing throughout.
Provost & dean offices, IR analysts
Program officers, strategic planning
Higher-ed reporters, think-tank analysts
Search firms, individual academics
Access · How it'll work
Subfield is designed to put institutional-grade academic data directly in the hands of the people asking the questions. Four tiers shape the access model — Browse, Pro, License, and Strategic — covering everyone from curious students to system-wide university deployments. Final pricing publishes at the end of the pilot, once the production feature set is locked and usage patterns are clear.
Browse
For the curious — students, reporters, the casually adjacent.
Pro · Self-Serve
For the working analyst — researchers, journalists, recruiters, IR staff. Monthly subscription with annual and academic rates planned at pilot close.
License · Institutional
Annual partnership for universities, foundations, and agencies. Scoped to size, structure, and the level of access your team needs — from small teaching colleges to system-wide deployments.
Strategic · Custom
Multi-month programs that combine bespoke analytical work with full platform access — for institutions and funders whose scope calls for tailored deliverables.
Browse stays free forever. Pro, License, and Strategic pricing publishes at pilot close — anchored to the locked production feature set and observed usage patterns. Institutional licenses and strategic engagements are always quoted to scope, with discounts considered case by case for students, public-interest journalism, and small institutions.
Registry Q3 2026 · Dashboard Q4 2026
The Canadian Academic Registry ships Q3 2026; the investigative dashboard follows in Q4 2026. Waitlist members get early access — free during alpha, a hand in shaping the GA release, and first look at the conversational layer once it clears testing.
Building an institutional pilot, commissioning a Strategic Mapping report, or partnering on a custom data layer? info@subfield.dev