CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context

TL;DR

CiteSee is a tool that enhances scientific reading by providing personalized citation context and prioritization, improving literature review efficiency through visual augmentations based on user activity.

Contribution

The paper introduces CiteSee, a novel citation augmentation tool that personalizes citation context and prioritization using user activity data, aiding literature review processes.

Findings

CiteSee significantly improves paper discovery over baseline methods.

Participants using CiteSee show better situational awareness during reviews.

CiteSee increases paper discovery via inline citation in real-world use.

Abstract

When reading a scholarly article, inline citations help researchers contextualize the current article and discover relevant prior work. However, it can be challenging to prioritize and make sense of the hundreds of citations encountered during literature reviews. This paper introduces CiteSee, a paper reading tool that leverages a user's publishing, reading, and saving activities to provide personalized visual augmentations and context around citations. First, CiteSee connects the current paper to familiar contexts by surfacing known citations a user had cited or opened. Second, CiteSee helps users prioritize their exploration by highlighting relevant but unknown citations based on saving and reading history. We conducted a lab study that suggests CiteSee is significantly more effective for paper discovery than three baselines. A field deployment study shows CiteSee helps participants keep track of their explorations and leads to better situational awareness and increased paper discovery via inline citation when conducting real-world literature reviews.