Generating visual summaries of research documents

A system comprising a plurality of components that are executable by a processor, the plurality of components comprising:

• a receiver component that receives user input pertaining to a first research document, wherein the first research document is authored by at least one author and is cited by a second research document;
• and
• a visualizer component that generates a graphical summary of the research document, wherein the graphical summary comprises at least a portion of a sentence in the second research document that includes the citation to the first research document.

A computer-readable medium comprising instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform acts comprising:

• receiving input pertaining to a research document from a user, wherein the research document is authored by an author and is cited to by a plurality of other research documents;
• executing a search over a document collection based at least in part upon the input, wherein the research document and citations to the research document by the plurality of other research documents is located during the executing of the search over the document collection;
• subsequent to executing the search over the document collection, generating a graphical summary visualization of the first research document, wherein the graphical summary visualization comprises a first node that is representative of the first research document, a plurality of other nodes that are representative of the plurality of other research documents that cite to the first research document, citing sentences in the plurality of other research documents shown in graphical relation to the plurality of other nodes, and a plurality of edges that couple the first node and the plurality of other nodes, respectively.