Supporting academic search tasks through citation visualization and exploration

Despite ongoing advances in information retrieval algorithms, people continue to experience difficulties when conducting online searches within digital libraries. Because their information-seeking goals are often complex, searchers may experience difficulty in precisely describing what they are seeking. Current search interfaces provide limited support for navigating and exploring among the search results and helping searchers to more accurately describe what they are looking for. In this paper, we present a novel visual library search interface, designed with the goal of providing interactive support for common library search tasks and behaviours. This system takes advantage of the rich metadata available in academic collections and employs information visualization techniques to support search results evaluation, forward and backward citation exploration, and interactive query refinement. © 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.