Can I have more of these please? Assisting researchers in finding similar research papers from a seed basket of papers

Abstract

Purpose

During the literature review phase, the task of finding similar research papers can be a difficult proposition for researchers due to the procedural complexity of the task. Current systems and approaches help in finding similar papers for a given paper, even though researchers tend to additionally search using a set of papers. This paper aims to focus on conceptualizing and developing recommendation techniques for key literature review and manuscript preparatory tasks that are interconnected. In this paper, the user evaluation results of the task where seed basket-based discovery of papers is performed are presented.

Design/methodology/approach

A user evaluation study was conducted on a corpus of papers extracted from the ACM Digital Library. Participants in the study included 121 researchers who had experience in authoring research papers. Participants, split into students and staff groups, had to select one of the provided 43 topics and run the tasks offered by the developed assistive system. A questionnaire was provided at the end of each task for evaluating the task performance.

Findings

The results show that the student group evaluated the task more favourably than the staff group, even though the difference was statistically significant for only 5 of the 16 measures. The measures topical relevance, interdisciplinarity, familiarity and usefulness were found to be significant predictors for user satisfaction in this task. A majority of the participants, who explicitly stated the need for assistance in finding similar papers, were satisfied with the recommended papers in the study.

Originality/value

The current research helps in bridging the gap between novices and experts in terms of literature review skills. The hybrid recommendation technique evaluated in this study highlights the effectiveness of combining the results of different approaches in finding similar papers.

Citation

Sesagiri Raamkumar, A., Foo, S. and Pang, N. (2018), "Can I have more of these please? Assisting researchers in finding similar research papers from a seed basket of papers", The Electronic Library, Vol. 36 No. 3, pp. 568-587. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-04-2017-0077