Patent attributes
A system for ranking electronic documents based on reference frequency includes a central controller in electronic communication with a document database. The central controller maintains a graphical model of the electronic documents that identifies all references between documents. A weight is automatically calculated and assigned to each reference within the graphical model in order to increase the significance of document references which are based on subject matter relevance and decrease the significance of document references which are based on interpersonal relationships or other meritless factors. Using the weighted graphical model, the central controller is able to automatically identify document clusters having similar subject matter, create a probability matrix for each cluster based on the weighted graphical model, and apply a power iteration to each probability matrix to yield a reference-based ranking of the electronic documents within each cluster.
