Systems and methods for identifying documents based on citation history

Systems, methods, and computer-executable instructions described herein relate to surfacing a set of documents ranked by their relative value calculated as a tabulation of how often they are cited for a specific purpose. In one embodiment a computer machine is configured to receive a query as computer machine input, automatically determine at least one concept contained within the query and automatically normalize the at least one concept contained within the query, thus creating at least one normalized concept. The computer machine is further configured to automatically compare the at least one normalized concept to at least one document centric concept profile associated with the set of content items in the corpora; and automatically surface a set of documents matching the document centric concept profile. The set of documents are ranked according to a reference value assigned to each document for a normalized concept.