Automated survey generation systems increasingly rely on flat retrieval over document collections, limiting their ability to capture the evolutionary structure of research fields. We present SurveyGraph, a framework centered on a Methods-Entity Knowledge Graph (MEKG) that encodes method-level follow-on, competition, and shared-resource relations across papers. The MEKG serves as a unified backbone for core-paper discovery, graph-aware retrieval, hybrid outline generation, and evolutionary narrative synthesis.

We evaluate SurveyGraph through a multi-level protocol spanning retrieval benchmarks, semantic-edge validation, citation grounding audits, benchmark-facing collection probes, and same-backend generation-stage diagnostics. In a controlled seven-method equal-budget benchmark, MEKG-anchored fusion achieves the best balance of recall and structural density among all tested methods, demonstrating that typed graph structure provides a complementary signal to simpler retrieval approaches. On the archived graph-native core diagnostic, graph-aware retrieval nearly doubles recall over flat lexical baselines across all eight runs (p = 0.004). A semantic evidence gate with AUC = 0.75 filters noisy edges, and citation-grounding audits over 160 generated sentences confirm 80.6% anchored-or-partial support with evidence-level contrasts validating genuine alignment. Human validation over 108 stratified semantic edges (Cohen’s κ = 0.64 for the binary support decision) confirms 68.5% supported-or-partial after adjudication, with improves relations strongest at 80.6% and extends weakest at 52.8%. A SurveyBench-facing collection probe reaches 0.521 mean reference coverage on four topics under an eight-paper budget; same-backend Qwen diagnostics over a 30-paper/74-relation MEKG further show that removing hybrid outlining lowers artifact organization signals. We report concurrent-system comparisons only as bounded diagnostics rather than same-backend end-to-end claims. Code and artifacts are available at: https://github.com/xzzvsxd/SurveyGraph.