Abstract: One variation of a method includes: accessing a corpus of scientific publications; compiling a population of semantic concepts from the corpus of scientific publications into a vector space model; deriving domains of concepts in the vector space model; deriving association scores and action characteristics between connected concepts in the vector space model; and generating a semantic network. This variation of the method further includes: receiving a query for a target concept and a target domain at a research portal; isolating a set of edges between a target node and a subset of nodes in the semantic network; identifying concepts along the set of edges in the semantic network; generating hypotheses for directions and magnitudes of effects of concepts on the target concept based on association scores and action characteristics stored in connections along the set of edges; and returning hypotheses to the research portal for a user to review.