Supporting Structured Browsing for Full-Text Scientific Research Reports

Abstract: Scientific research is highly structured and some of that structure is reflected in research reports. Traditional scientific research reports are yielding to interactive documents which expose their internal structure and are richly linked to other materials. In these changes, there are opportunities to take advantage of the structure in scientific research reports which previously have not been systematically captured. Thus, we explore ways of capturing more of the structure of research in reports about the research and we use that structure to support the development of a new generation of document browsers which include novel interaction widgets. We apply the browsers incorporating the conceptual modeling framework to full-text research reports from the Public Library of Science (PLoS). In addition, we describe the application of model-oriented constructs to facilitating highly interlinked digital libraries.