Metadata visualization of scholarly search results: supporting exploration and discovery

  • Authors:

  • Taraneh Khazaei;Orland Hoeber

  • Affiliations:

  • Memorial University of Newfoundland, NL, Canada;University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Studies of online search behaviour have found that searchers often face difficulties formulating queries and exploring the search results sets. These shortcomings may be especially problematic in digital libraries since library searchers employ a wide variety of information seeking methods (with varying degrees of support), and the corpus to be searched is often more complex than simple textual information. This paper presents Bow Tie Academic Search, an interactive Web-based academic library search interface aimed at supporting the strategic retrieval behaviour of searchers. In this system, a histogram of the most frequently used keywords in the top search results is provided, along with a compact visual encoding that represents document similarities based on the co-use of keywords. In addition, the list-based representation of the search results is enhanced with visual representations of citation information for each search result. A detailed view of this citation information is provided when a particular search result is selected. These tools are designed to provide visual and interactive support for query refinement, search results exploration, and citation navigation, making extensive use of the metadata provided by the underlying academic information retrieval system.