6. The method of claim 1 , wherein decomposing the associative networks into clusters of topics or fields comprises the processor clustering nodes and measuring quality of the clustering by calculating modularity and/or mean silhouette scores for the clusters of fields or topics.
1. A computer-implemented method for automatically generating systematic reviews of documents in a field of literature, comprising a programmed processor performing the following steps: constructing associative networks of documents within the received documents; decomposing the associative networks into clusters of fields or topics; performing part-of-speech tagging of text within the received documents; constructing semantic and ontological structures and/or assertions extracted from the documents; generating citation-based and content-based summaries of the clusters of topics or fields and the semantic and ontological structures; and generating structured narratives of the clusters of field or topic-characterizing documents and the summaries of the generated semantic structures, wherein constructing associative networks of documents within the received documents comprises the processor selecting node types and link types for each time slice of the received documents, computing similarity or proximity scores for the nodes, constructing networks of the node information, and merging respective networks from different time slices.