In-depth Research Impact Summarization through Fine-Grained Temporal Citation Analysis

Understanding the impact of scientific publications is crucial for identifying breakthroughs and guiding future research. Traditional metrics based on citation counts often miss the nuanced ways a paper contributes to its field. In this work, we propose a new task: generating nuanced, expressive, and time-aware impact summaries that capture both praise (confirmation citations) and critique (correction citations) through the evolution of fine-grained citation intents. We introduce an evaluation framework tailored to this task, showing moderate to strong human correlation on subjective metrics such as insightfulness. Expert feedback from professors reveals a strong interest in these summaries and suggests future improvements. Data and code are made available. 1