Project Summary

• Performed research in the Dynamic Graphics Project lab at the University of Toronto, to develop and evaluate a web application that assists researchers in the literature review workflow 
• Conducted formative interviews to gather information about academics current methods of performing bibliography searches and literature reviews 
• Developed LitSense, an end-to-end tool to support literature review workflows from paper discovery to synthesis. Unlike existing reference management tools that maintain "collections" of papers, LitSense is designed to focus on a particular research question, a distinction
  relevant to cases where a paper contributes different perspectives to various literature reviews and mental models.
• Conducted holistic and ecologically valid assessment of literature review workflows. Our investigations followed a user centered approach and examined practices of 27 researchers, assessing current practices and how workflows fare under a more integrated approach to literature review with LitSense.

Methodology

LitSense Interface

LitSense components: (A) Search panel; (B) Publications list, (C) Topic Graph; (D) Paper Details tab, active when a paper node is selected; (E) Summary tab; (F) Filter by keyword; (G) Sort by criteria, with color map ; (H) Timeline view ; (I) the top menu, featuring export functions and an option to alternate the Topic Graph and Timeline views; and (J) the History view.

Resulting Publications:

1. Nicole Sultanum, Christine Murad, and Daniel Wigdor. 2020. Understanding and Supporting Academic Literature Review Workflows with LitSense. In Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 67, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3399715.3399830