Evaluating visual and statistical exploration of scientific literature networks (original) (raw)
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Understanding Scientific Literature Networks: An Evaluation of Action Science Explorer
2011
ABSTRACT Action Science Explorer (ASE) is a tool designed to support users in rapidly generating readily consumable summaries of academic literature. The authors describe ASE and report on how early formative evaluations led to a mature system evaluation, consisting of an in-depth empirical evaluation with 4 domain expert participants. The user study tasks were of two types: predefined tasks to test system performance in common scenarios, and user-defined tasks to test the system's usefulness for custom exploration goals.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2012
Keeping up with rapidly growing research fields, especially when there are multiple interdisciplinary sources, requires substantial effort for researchers, program managers, or venture capital investors. Current theories and tools are directed at finding a paper or website, not gaining an understanding of the key papers, authors, controversies, and hypotheses. This report presents an effort to integrate statistics, text analytics, and visualization in a multiple coordinated window environment that supports exploration. Our prototype system, Action Science Explorer (ASE), provides an environment for demonstrating principles of coordination and conducting iterative usability tests of them with interested and knowledgeable users. We developed an understanding of the value of reference management, statistics, citation text extraction, natural language summarization for single and multiple documents, filters to interactively select key papers, and network visualization to see citation patterns and identify clusters. A three-phase usability study guided our revisions to ASE and led us to improve the testing methods.
Bibliometric Visualization and Analysis Software: State of the Art, Workflows, and Best Practices
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Despite the demonstrated value of visualization-based modalities for measuring and mapping science, it remains common practice to search and explore the literature via databases that present lists of articles with little, if any, supplementary visual information. Identifying the desired item in a list is a familiar information retrieval paradigm with a low cognitive load. However, given the rapid emergence of the field of visual text analytics, it is time to challenge the notion that article lists should remain the dominant method to search and organize the scientific literature. One reason that visualization methods are applied relatively rarely in information retrieval may be that it is difficult to develop useful and user-friendly science mapping systems. This article summarizes key workflows for bibliometric mapping, a technique for visually representing information from scientific publications, including citation data, bibliographic metadata, and article content. It describes m...
CircleView: Scalable Visualization and Navigation of Citation Networks
CircleView is a citation network browser that uses circles around circles as its visualization method to show a focus paper and two levels of its citation network. This method scales to varying numbers of papers and references, and has a structured layout that makes the visualization more readable. Bibliographic metadata is available via mouseover for all displayed papers. General requirements are presented for citation network visualization and navigation tools. An important requirement is the ability to integrate with existing institutional digital libraries, satisfied by CircleView’s use of web browser facilities for its user interface. CircleView is shown to have good visualization and performance scalability characteristics.
Evaluation of a Prototype Search and Visualization System for Exploring Scientific Communities
AMIA Annual Symposium …, 2009
Searches of bibliographic databases generate lists of articles but do little to reveal connections between authors, institutions, and grants. As a result, search results cannot be fully leveraged. To address this problem we developed Sciologer, a prototype search and visualization system. Sciologer presents the results of any PubMed query as an interactive network diagram of the above elements. We conducted a cognitive evaluation with six neuroscience and six obesity researchers. Researchers used the system effectively. They used geographic, color, and shape metaphors to describe community structure and made accurate inferences pertaining to a) collaboration among research groups; b) prominence of individual researchers; and c) differentiation of expertise. The tool confirmed certain beliefs, disconfirmed others, and extended their understanding of their own discipline. The majority indicated the system offered information of value beyond a traditional PubMed search and that they would use the tool if available.
2020
Literature search and recommendation systems have traditionally focused on improving recommendation accuracy through new algorithmic approaches. Less research has focused on the crucial task of visualizing the retrieved results to the user. Today, the most common visualization for literature search and recommendation systems remains the ranked list. However, this format exhibits several shortcomings, especially for academic literature. We present an alternative visual interface for exploring the results of an academic literature retrieval system using a force-directed graph layout. The interactive information visualization techniques we describe allow for a higher resolution search and discovery space tailored to the unique feature-based similarity present among academic literature. RecVis - the visual interface we propose - supports academics in exploring the scientific literature beyond textual similarity alone, since it enables the rapid identification of other forms of similarit...
ScienScan – An Efficient Visualization and Browsing Tool for Academic Search
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013
In this paper we present ScienScan 1 -a browsing and visualization tool for academic search. The tool operates in real time by post-processing the query results returned by an academic search engine. ScienScan discovers topics in the search results and summarizes them in the form of a concise hierarchical topic map. The produced topical summary informatively represents the results in a visual way and provides an additional filtering control. We demonstrate the operation of ScienScan deploying it on top of the search API of Microsoft Academic Search.
A Visualization of Research Papers Based on the Topics and Citation Network
2015 19th International Conference on Information Visualisation, 2015
Survey of research papers is not an easy task for novice researchers, because they are not always good at finding all appropriate keywords for the survey. Moreover, it is not easy for them to understand positions of papers in their research fields instantly, even when they use famous search engines like Google Scholar; it may often take a long time for them to find scholarly literature. On the other hand, many researchers have presented citation visualization techniques for surveying research papers. However, it is still often difficult to observe the complicated relations across multiple research fields or traverse the entire relations in their interest. In this paper, we proposed a visualization technique for citation networks applying topic-based paper clustering. Our technique categorizes papers applying LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), and constructs clustered networks consisting of the papers.
Web Science 2013, 2013
At the beginning of a scientific study, it is usually quite hard to get an overview of a research field. We aim to address this problem of classic literature search using web data. In this extended abstract, we present work-in-progress on an interactive visualization of research fields based on readership statistics from the social referencemanagement system Mendeley. To that end, we use library co-occurrences as a measure of subject similarity. In a first evaluation, we find that the visualization covers current research areas within educational technology but presents a view that is biased by the characteristics of readers. With our presentation, we hope to elicit feedback from theWebsci’13 audience on (1) the usefulness of the prototype, and (2) how to overcome the aforementioned biases using collaborative construction techniques.