Head Start: Improving Academic Literature Search with Overview Visualizations based on Readership Statistics

At the beginning of a scientific study, it is usually quite hard to get an overview of a research field. We aim to address this problem of classic literature search using web data. In this extended abstract, we present work-in-progress on an interactive visualization of research fields based on reader- ship statistics from the social referencemanagement system Mendeley. To that end, we use library co-occurrences as a measure of subject similarity. In a first evaluation, we find that the visualization covers current research areas within educational technology but presents a view that is biased by the characteristics of readers. With our presentation, we hope to elicit feedback from theWebsci’13 audience on (1) the usefulness of the prototype, and (2) how to overcome the aforementioned biases using collaborative construction techniques.