Sometimes, when read a technical paper, I become curious about some work or other cited in the references. If that work is in my own field, then it is pretty easy for me to read the referenced work.
But often the cited paper will be in a field that I know next to nothing about. Even if it is the correct reference, this sort of cited paper does me little good. What is missing is some sort of graceful transition between the paper I am reading and the papers it cites.
In real life we see graceful transitions all around us: Trains arrive at platforms within train stations, oceans have beaches, cities have suburbs, houses have hallways leading to rooms. In the physical world, you rarely find yourself walking from an open field directly into a deep forest. Generally there is some sort of lightly wooded area between them, a transitional space where the density of foliage gradually increases.
Yet if I am reading a paper on computer graphics and I follow a reference, I might suddenly find myself plunged into a highly technical research discussion about biomechanics, or the physics of vorticity, or the quantum nature of light, written by and for experts in some other field. The problem here is that the cited paper has no concept of where I am coming from, and why I am reading it.
Obviously it would be impractical to manually create contextualized transitions for every cited reference. Yet perhaps tools could be developed to semi-automate the process of creating such transitional descriptions. If such a thing could be made to work, think of the benefits for scholars everywhere!
With any luck, Google is already working on it. 🙂