A Visual Query System for Scholar Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a visual query system for scholar networks like Aminer, using graph visualizations to improve user understanding and search effectiveness in academic social networks.

Contribution

It introduces three novel visualization designs for scholar network search results and empirically evaluates their effectiveness through user studies.

Findings

Visual graphs improve user understanding of scholar networks.

Graph visualizations make searches more effective.

Designed visualizations enhance exploration of academic social networks.

Abstract

Large scholar networks is quite popular in the academic domain, like Aminer. It offers to display the academic social network, including profile search, expert finding, conference analysis, course search, sub-graph search, topic browser, academic ranks and user management. Usually the search results are listed as items, while the relations among them are hidden to the users. Visualization is a feasible way to help users explore the hidden relations and discover more useful information. This article aim to visualize the search results in Aminer in a more user-friendly way and help them better utilize the tool. We provided three different designs to visualize the results and tested them in user study. The empirical results of our research show that the designed graphs help users better understand the area they intend to know and make their search more effective.