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When you find an important paper, you want to know what built up to it and how the field built on top of it. This tutorial uses Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al., 2017) as the anchor. You’ll learn how to:
  1. Pull a paper’s outgoing references grouped by intellectual lineage
  2. Trace forward citations and filter them by topic and recency
  3. Map the past and future of any foundational paper in one workflow

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Step 1: Look backward

Research Agent looks up the paper, crawls its references through the citation graph, shortlists and reads the most relevant ones, and returns the lineage: key attention precursors, the architectures that evolved over time, and a summary of the field.

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Step 2: Look forward, narrowed to a niche

Consensus runs several searches on how the field developed, applies the recency filter, explores the citation graph for papers that reference the anchor, and runs extra searches to fill gaps. The result is an overview of how one seminal paper shaped a specific subfield in a specific window.
For a visual version of the same idea, open any paper and click Graph. See Citation Graph.

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The same trace, as a graph

Citation Graph does this visually. It ranks papers by three citation signals rather than keywords:
  • Direct citation — the paper cites your seed, or your seed cites it.
  • Co-citation — how often the paper and your seed appear together in other papers’ reference lists.
  • Bibliographic coupling — how many references the paper shares with your seed.
A traditional crawl only looks forward or backward from one paper; combining the three signals surfaces related work a crawl misses.
A citation graph showing seed papers and their citing and cited neighbors over time

Arrows point from a paper to the paper it cites. Hover a node to highlight its connections.

Open it from any paper’s sidebar with the Citation Graph button, or from Graph in the left nav. Up to 5 seeds; 20, 40, or 60 papers.

Snowball to a full reading list

Research an author's body of work