Clustering documents using citation patterns

Abstract

Systems and methods for clustering documents, such as for scientific documents, taking into account the citation patterns of the documents are disclosed. In one embodiment, the method includes locating citations to other documents, e.g., search result documents, comparing each pair of documents to be clustered for overlapping citations in a first, a more specific second, and an even more specific optional third citation generality, and determining clusters of related documents based on the comparisons. The levels of generalities may be, for example, document-, paragraph-, and/or citation-level generalities. The locating may locate only citations to the other documents to be clustered. The clusters may be determined based on a weighted score of the amount of overlapping citations in the various generalities and/or by performing factor analysis using the comparison results. The clusters may be ranked to determine the dominant clusters.