Augmenting the exploration of digital libraries with web-based visualizations

Web-based digital libraries have sped up the process that scholars use to find new, important research papers. Unfortunately, current digital libraries are limited by their inadequate webpage-based paradigm, and it is easy for even the most experienced scholar to get lost. A paper and its immediate references are shown on a webpage, but it is not obvious where that paper belongs in the larger context of a field of research. The goal for our research was to develop and test the effectiveness of a web-based application, PaperCube, that was designed to augment a scholar´s interaction with a digital library and explore bibliographic meta data using a defined set of visualizations. These visualizations needed to provide different levels of visibility into a paper´s citation network without losing focus of the currently viewed paper. PaperCube was validated through a user study which showed that it was very useful when it comes to augmenting digital library search by reducing the ¿cognitive load¿ put on a scholar and aiding the ¿discoverability¿ of new research material.