A system and method for generating cluster spines is provided. Clusters of documents are maintained. Each document is associated with a document concept that is formed from one or more terms extracted from that document. At least one cluster concept is determined for each cluster. The document concepts are ranked and at least one of the document concepts that is highly ranked is selected as the cluster concept. One or more spines are formed. Each spine includes two or more clusters that share at least one of the cluster concepts. The shared cluster concept is identified as a spine concept. One or more of the remaining clusters is assigned to the spines based on a similarity between the cluster concepts for the remaining clusters and the spine concepts for the formed spines.