PaperPoles: Facilitating adaptive visual exploration of scientific publications by citation links

Abstract

Finding relevant publications is a common task. Typically, a researcher browses through a list of publications and traces additional relevant publications. When relevant publications are identified, the list may be expanded by the citation links of the relevant publications. The information needs of researchers may change as they go through such iterative processes. The exploration process quickly becomes cumbersome as the list expands. Most existing academic search systems tend to be limited in terms of the extent to which searchers can adapt their search as they proceed. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive visual exploration system named PaperPoles to support exploration of scientific publications in a context-aware environment. Searchers can express their information needs by intuitively formulating positive and negative queries. Search results are grouped and displayed in a cluster view, which shows aspects and relevance patterns of the results to support navigation and exploration. We conducted an experiment to compare PaperPoles with a list-based interface in performing two academic search tasks with different complexity. The results show that PaperPoles can improve the accuracy of searching for the simple and complex tasks. It can also reduce completion time of searching and exploration effectiveness in the complex task. PaperPoles demonstrates a potentially effective workflow for adaptive visual search of complex information.

Past, present, and future research on self-service merchandising: a co-word and text mining approach

“…It is designed to import data exclusively from WoS (e.g. Martínez-Sánchez et al, 2017;He et al, 2019) and Scopus (e.g. Saito and Strehlau, 2018;Venkatraman et al, 2018).…”

“…This software analyzes the content of publications and extracts the research topics that have attracted the interest of the international academic community. It is designed to import data exclusively from WoS (Martínez-S anchez et al, 2017;He et al, 2019) and Scopus (Saito and Strehlau, 2018;Venkatraman et al, 2018). Cobo et al (2018) argue that SciMAT is a powerful tool that integrates the majority of the advantages of the available science-mapping software tools.…”

Assisting researchers in bibliographic tasks: A new usable, real‐time tool for analyzing bibliographies

“…The only three active projects, to the best of our knowledge, are CiteSpace III (Chen et al, 2010), VOSviewer (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010; van Eck & Waltman, 2017), and PaperPoles (He et al, 2019). VOSviewer enables users to visualize bibliometric networks, for example, co‐authorship, bibliographic coupling, and co‐citation networks, and to tune layout and clustering results, using various parameters.…”

GlassViz: Visualizing Automatically-Extracted Entry Points for Exploring Scientific Corpora in Problem-Driven Visualization Research

“…Visual Text Analytics (VTA) of Scientific Literature: In recent times, some authors have started to incorporate linguistic and sensemaking models into their VTA tools to replicate the typical tasks and goals of exploring scientific texts [12]. For example, the Action Science Explorer [10] and PaperPoles [15] mimic the sensemaking process of traditional literature reviews. Concretely, PaperPoles supports the browsing of publications in a context-aware environment by requesting positive or negative queries from the user as the application workflow progresses.…”