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

Hiba Arnaout, Noy Sternlicht, Tom Hope, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.307
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6749–6789
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.307/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hiba Arnaout, Noy Sternlicht, Tom Hope, and Iryna Gurevych. 2026. In-depth Research Impact Summarization through Fine-Grained Temporal Citation Analysis. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6749–6789, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
In-depth Research Impact Summarization through Fine-Grained Temporal Citation Analysis (Arnaout et al., ACL 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.307.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.acl-long.307.checklist.pdf