We designed a new annotation scheme for formalising relation structures in research papers, through the investigation of computer science papers. The annotation scheme is based on the hypothesis that identifying the role of entities and events that are described in a paper is useful for intelligent information retrieval in academic literature, and the role can be determined by the relationship between the author and the described entities or events, and relationships among them. Using the scheme, we have annotated research abstracts from the IPSJ Journal published in Japanese by the Information Processing Society of Japan. On the basis of the annotated corpus, we have developed a prototype information extraction system which has the facility to classify sentences according to the relationship between entities mentioned, to help find the role of the entity in which the searcher is interested.