1. A system for generating timelines of events from publications, the system comprising: a timeline generator comprising computer hardware, the timeline generator configured to, for each of a plurality of publications represented in an electronic catalog: extract contextual terms from text of the publication, select item events from the contextual terms, the item events comprising data on events described in the publication, use the contextual terms to retrieve historical data from a data repository, the historical data being associated with at least some of the contextual terms in the data repository, and generate a context-based timeline comprising at least some of the historical events and at least some of the events described in the publication; a timeline data repository configured to store the context-based timeline generated for each of the publications by the timeline generator; a similarity mining module configured to detect similarities between the publications by at least detecting overlap between timelines of the publications to produce similarities data; and a timeline recommender configured to provide personalized publication recommendations to a user by at least: identifying a selected one of the publications that was selected by the user, identifying first publications of the publications that are similar to the selected publication from the similarities data, and outputting the first publications as the personalized publication recommendations for presentation to the user.