MUSES: A Benchmark for Prospective Intellectual-Roots Retrieval

Abstract

Scientific discovery depends on finding prior literature that shapes what comes next. Existing retrieval systems optimize for relevance and popularity, often favoring central papers over less familiar works that later prove generative. We introduce \textbf{MUSES}, a million-instance benchmark for prospective intellectual-roots retrieval over a fixed 2.33M-paper corpus, with roughly 140K test instances per familiarity tier. To our knowledge, it is the first prospective benchmark at this scale with a shared retrieval task and author-confirmed paper-level root labels. Alongside it, \textbf{CiteRoots} pairs a scalable rhetorical layer over local citation text (LLM judge $κ= 0.896$ versus human gold) with a paper-level author-endorsed layer ($n = 1{,}518$ generative-inspiration pairs from 753 focal papers). MUSES organizes difficulty along two axes: a \emph{familiarity} axis spanning CiteNext, CiteNew, and CiteNew-Isolated, and a \emph{functional} axis spanning broad citations, rhetorical roots, and author-endorsed roots. Across 9 method classes, a lean multi-centroid retriever built on SPECTER2 is strongest. Hit@100 falls from 0.534 on CiteNext to 0.424 on CiteNew, 0.205 on rhetorical CiteNew, and 0.171 on author-endorsed CiteNew, a $3.1\times$ decline. In a registered eight-lens full-test audit, roughly half of broad-tier test instances remain unsolved at K=1{,}000. Rhetorical role and author endorsement are distinct: the same judge agrees with endorsement at $κ= 0.037$. We release MUSES, both CiteRoots layers, and a distilled open companion judge for future work on prospective retrieval and intellectual roots.