A computer-implemented method of semantically linking, by a computing device, a citing document to a cited document in a corpus of documents includes locating at least one citation present in the citing document, determining a reason-for-citing for at least one citation, and determining a cited-text-area present in the cited document, wherein the cited-text-area corresponds with the reason-for-citing. The method further includes populating a citation entry of a citation-pairing metadata file with a citing-document identifier, a reason-for-citing identifier, a cited-document identifier, and a cited-text-area identifier. The citation-pairing metadata file includes a plurality of citation entries and is stored separately from the citing document and the cited document.