Supporting Literature Review by Searching, Visualizing and Navigating Related Papers

Abstract

Citations and their accompanying information such as citation context is a very important consideration when searching for relevant information in literature. With literature continually expanding, obtaining this information in an efficient and effective way, using a standard search tool becomes a very laborious task. In addition, scientific articles found in the literature employ rich interrelationships e.g., citation and their accompanying information making it very difficult for standard search applications to present these interrelationships to the searcher in an efficient manner. In order to alleviate this intensive task, we have designed a tool VisNavi (Visualization and Navigation) that supports scientific researchers in their literature review, in a form of a visualized star-center approach that, for the current treated paper places a citing author at its center and the richly embedded interrelationships are spun around it. The star design enables researchers to gain a clearer insight by interactively exploring these rich interrelationships along with their accompanying information. We designed a human judgment experiment to obtain a human rating on the functionality of the tool. We then cast the human rating as a reference point to improve the tool's design.