Authoring and Reviewing Bibliographies: Design and Development of a Visual Analytics Online Platform

Researchers are daily engaged in bibliographic tasks concerning literature search and review, both in the role of authors of scientific papers and when they are reviewers or evaluators. Current indexing platforms offer powerful tools for searching bibliographic references, but in general they poorly support the integration, visualization and comparative analysis of metadata coming from subsequent searches. To address these issues, we designed and realized VisualBib(va), an online analytics solution, where a visual environment includes analysis control, bibliography exploration, automatic metadata extraction and metrics visualization for real-time scenarios. Starting from an analysis of tasks, associating them to different user roles, this study enabled us to define a taxonomy of tasks, strictly linked to a set of system requirements for our platform. We introduce and discuss here some relevant functions through two usage scenarios related to the creation and the review of a bibliography. The maturity of the system implementation has allowed us to propose a set of evaluation activities, both carried out by two groups of users with different levels of experience in managing bibliographies, and to collect detailed results based on specific tasks and on general aspects of our framework. VisualBib(va) proved an effective and efficient system for the authoring and reviewing processes of a bibliography.