ComLittee: Literature Discovery with Personal Elected Author Committees

TL;DR

ComLittee is a literature discovery system that enhances research exploration by focusing on authors, enabling personalized author-centric curation and discovery, which improves efficiency, quality, and novelty in finding relevant papers and authors.

Contribution

The paper introduces ComLittee, a novel author-centric literature discovery system that supports personalized curation and improves research exploration over traditional paper-centric systems.

Findings

Higher efficiency in author discovery

Improved quality and novelty in research exploration

Enhanced paper discovery through author-centric signals

Abstract

In order to help scholars understand and follow a research topic, significant research has been devoted to creating systems that help scholars discover relevant papers and authors. Recent approaches have shown the usefulness of highlighting relevant authors while scholars engage in paper discovery. However, these systems do not capture and utilize users' evolving knowledge of authors. We reflect on the design space and introduce ComLittee, a literature discovery system that supports author-centric exploration. In contrast to paper-centric interaction in prior systems, ComLittee's author-centric interaction supports curation of research threads from individual authors, finding new authors and papers with combined signals from a paper recommender and the curated authors' authorship graphs, and understanding them in the context of those signals. In a within-subjects experiment that compares to an author-highlighting approach, we demonstrate how ComLittee leads to a higher efficiency, quality, and novelty in author discovery that also improves paper discovery.