Evaluation of Argo Scholar with Observational Study

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Argo Scholar, a visualization tool for literature exploration, demonstrating its effectiveness in large-scale user studies across various disciplines and providing insights for future improvements.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive evaluation of Argo Scholar's effectiveness in literature exploration through a large-scale user study, highlighting its strengths and areas for enhancement.

Findings

Argo Scholar helps users find related work effectively.

Incremental graph exploration benefits diverse disciplines.

User feedback informs future design improvements.

Abstract

Discovering and making sense of relevant literature is fundamental in any scientific field. Node-link diagram-based visualization tools can aid this process; however, existing tools have been evaluated only on small scales. This paper evaluates Argo Scholar, an open-source visualization tool designed for interactive exploration of literature and easy sharing of exploration results. A large-scale user study of 122 participants from diverse backgrounds and experiences showed that Argo Scholar is effective at helping users find related work and understand paper connections, and incremental graph-based exploration is effective across diverse disciplines. Based on the user study and user feedback, we provide design considerations and feature suggestions for future work.