Patent ID: 7765205

Claim:
A method for identifying landmark documents in a document database, wherein each document in the database has a standardized citation and a normalized document identifier corresponding to the standardized citation, and wherein each document that includes a citation to another document in the database also includes a normalized document identifier keyword for the normalized document identifier of the cited document, the method comprising the steps of: (a) retrieving from a database the most relevant documents on a topic selected by a user from a pre-defined topical hierarchy, the retrieved documents defining an answer set; (b) following step (a), displaying the answer set to the user, sorted in an order based on bibliographic information; (c) following step (b), and in response to a user request to sort the answer set based on frequency of citation, retrieving the normalized document identifiers corresponding to the standardized citations of the retrieved documents; (d) constructing a search request using the retrieved normalized document identifiers as search terms, wherein the search request contains a search term for each document in the answer set; (e) generating document frequency counts for each search term within the search request for documents in the answer set by counting occurrences of each normalized document identifier keyword corresponding to a search term within the request in the documents in the answer set; (f) resorting the documents within the answer set based upon the document frequency counts; and (g) following step (f), displaying the resorted answer set to the user.