According to an aspect, searching, recommending, and exploring documents through conceptual associations includes receiving a plurality of documents and extracting concepts from each of the documents. A degree of relation between each of the documents and concepts in a knowledge base is calculated. An aspect also includes, in response to receiving a query, determining one or more concepts from the query. For each of the concepts, a list of documents having a highest degree of relation to the concept is retrieved. An aspect also includes outputting a list that is responsive to the one or more retrieved lists.