State-of-the-art faceted search graphical user interfaces for digital libraries provide a wide range of filters perfectly suitable for narrowing down results for well-defined user needs. However, they fail to deliver summarized overview information for users that need to familiarize themselves with a new scientific topic. In fact, exploratory search remains one of the major problems for scientific literature search in digital libraries. Exploiting a user study about how computer scientists actually approach new subject areas we developed ESSENCE, a system for empowering exploratory search in scientific literature.