Papers101: Supporting the Discovery Process in the Literature Review Workflow for Novice Researchers

Abstract

A literature review is a critical task in performing research. However, even browsing an academic database and choosing must-read items can be daunting for novice researchers. In this paper, we introduce Papers101, an interactive system that supports novice researchers' discovery of papers relevant to their research topics. Prior to system design, we performed a formative study to investigate what difficulties novice researchers often face and how experienced researchers address them. We found that novice researchers have difficulty in identifying appropriate search terms, choosing which papers to read first, and ensuring whether they have examined enough candidates. In this work, we identified key requirements for the system dedicated to novices: prioritizing search results, unifying the contexts of multiple search results, and refining and validating the search queries. Accordingly, Papers101 provides an opinionated perspective on selecting important metadata among papers. It also visualizes how the priority among papers is developed along with the users' knowledge discovery process. Finally, we demonstrate the potential usefulness of our system with the case study on the metadata collection of papers in visualization and HCI community.