Exploratory Search for Scientific Articles

Abstract

It is intuitively clear that search for scientific publications often has many characteristics of exploratory search. The purpose of this paper is to formalize this intuitive understanding, explore which scientific search tasks can be classified as research search ones, what general approaches to the research search problem exist, and how they are implemented in specialized search engines for scientists. We overview the existing works that address the information-seeking behavior of scientists and a special variant of search called exploratory search. There are several types of search behavior typical for scientists; we show that most of them are exploratory ones. Exploratory search differs from information retrieval and requires special support from the search systems. We analyze seventeen search systems for academicians (from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science to ResearchGate) from the perspective of exploratory search support. We find that most of them do not go far beyond simple information retrieval, and there is room for further improvements, especially in collaborative search support.

Evaluating the user experience in a digital library

“…As a suggestion, and based on the gathered user requirements, visualized DL interfaces could better support the search experiences and speed up the time taken by struggling searchers. Interactive visualization techniques as in (Nedumov et al, 2019, Ruotsalo et al, 2013) might improve the UX and facilitate the search process.…”

Transitioning from benchmarks to a real-world case of information-seeking in Scientific Publications

“…Information-seeking strategies described by Belkin et al (1995) represent how a searcher might use different methods and resources and have different aims. The broad information-seeking behavior of scientists is usually regarded as an exploratory search problem (Meho and Tibbo, 2003;Athukorala et al, 2013;Nedumov and Kuznetsov, 2019). When searching for information in scientific publications, experts have specific information needs, and they seek information that is relevant to those needs.…”