ReVisE: Research Visualization and Exploration Tool for Researchers and Scholars

Abstract

Keeping up with rapidly emerging research fronts in various inter-disciplinary fields requires significant effort from scholars and researchers. These users are concerned not only with finding relevant articles or websites, but also for gaining the understanding of key articles, authors, citation information, and current trends. Several tools such as Action Science Explorer (ASE) have been developed to evaluate the network of citations between articles, recognize important papers and their clusters, summarize them automatically, delve into the full-text of papers to fetch context, generate reviews, create annotations and finally export results in numerous document authoring formats. Although ASE is useful for researchers and scholars, as a research prototype it is limited and tested on data from the ACL Anthology Network. ASE does not have the ability to automatically import and process scholarly articles from external repositories such as Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, and the ACM Digital Library. This thesis contributes an enhanced ASE renamed as ReVisE which automates the data import process: starting with a web search, then generating a citation network, statistics, text analytics, and cluster summaries. Our enhanced ASE gives researchers in many fields the ability to gain an understanding of their academic literature: the key papers, authors, research fronts, hypothesis, and state of the art. The conceptual research framework of Action Science Explorer, is evaluated on the basis of the technology acceptance model. The study also provides an indicator of researcher’s acceptance of Action Science Explorer as well as identifying the important factors that would contribute to its successful use. The outcomes will enrich the understanding of researcher’s acceptance of research visualization and exploration tools.