Understanding Scientific Literature Networks: An Evaluation of Action Science Explorer

Action Science Explorer (ASE) is a tool designed to supportusers 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 perfor-
mance in common scenarios, and user-defined tasks to test
the system’s usefulness for custom exploration goals. This
paper concludes by describing ASE’s attribute ranking ca-
pability which is a novel contribution for exploring scientific
literature networks. It makes design recommendations to:
give the users control over which documents to explore, easy-
to-understand metrics for ranking documents, and overviews
of the document set in coordinated views along with details-
on-demand of specific papers.