Has this been done?

How this check works

Your abstract is turned into a vector — a position in a space where work about the same subject lands in the same region, whatever words it used. Every project in the archive already has one. The check measures the distance from yours to all of them, so it finds prior work that never used your vocabulary, which is the case a keyword search cannot reach.

It reports the shape of the neighbourhood rather than a verdict: how many projects sit within each distance band, how many of those are recent, how many placed, and which years they span. A crowded band close to you means the question has been worked; a crowded band further out with nothing close means you are in a live field at an angle nobody took.

What a clear result does not mean. This archive is 20,037 projects from four competitions, not the scientific literature. "No close prior work here" means nobody at these fairs, in these years, entered something like it. That is the population your project will be judged against, which makes it worth knowing — and it is not a novelty claim.

Your abstract is not stored, and the page that shows your result is never cached. More on searching by meaning → · What to do with the prior work you find →