A survey on the importance of visualization and social collaboration in academic digital libraries

Abstract: From more than half a century ago indexing scientific articles has been studied intensively to provide a more efficient data retrieval and to conserve researchers invaluable time. In the last two decades with the emergence of the World Wide Web and the rapid growth in the number of scientific documents online many academic databases and search engines were launched with almost similar structure in order to reduce the difficulty in finding, relating and sorting of the existing scientific documents published online. The dramatic increase of the scientific documents in the last few years makes it necessary that the retrieved information by the search engines be analyzed and more organized and interpretable representation be displayed to the users. Information visualization is a great way for exploration of large and complex data sets, therefore it can be a natural candidate for the purpose of generating more comprehensible search results for the citation and academic databases. In this survey the usage pattern of the participants and their demands and ideas for the existence of other beneficial methods for literature review has been questioned and the results are quantitatively analyzed.