Abstract: This invention provides a system method for search and displaying text-based documents, based upon user-input search terms that organizes and displays documentary search results in a series of clusters of documents that have been sorted in a manner that relates to the general relevance of those documents to the search terms. In particular, this system and method allows for the searching of large databases of related documents by utilizing citations between those documents to improve search efficiency as well as visualization of search results. The document databases (DD) are used to generate a document connectivity index (DCI), of which a copy is stored on (or remotely accessed by) the client computer. The client issues a search request to a DD server, which returns a list of matching documents. The client compares this list against the DCI to generate a sorted list of document clusters. Using a graphical interface, the user can view and navigate these clusters to identify and view documents of interest.