@article {13882, title = {Understanding Scientific Literature Networks: An Evaluation of Action Science Explorer}, year = {2011}, month = {2011///}, institution = {University of Maryland at College Park}, abstract = {Action Science Explorer (ASE) is a tool designed to supportusers in rapidly generating readily consumable summaries of academic literature. The authors describe ASE and report on how early formative evaluations led to a mature system evaluation, consisting of an in-depth empirical evaluation with 4 domain expert participants. The user study tasks were of two types: predefined tasks to test system perfor- mance in common scenarios, and user-defined tasks to test the system{\textquoteright}s usefulness for custom exploration goals. This paper concludes by describing ASE{\textquoteright}s attribute ranking ca- pability which is a novel contribution for exploring scientific literature networks. It makes design recommendations to: give the users control over which documents to explore, easy- to-understand metrics for ranking documents, and overviews of the document set in coordinated views along with details- on-demand of specific papers. }, author = {Gove,R. and Dunne,C. and Shneiderman, Ben and Klavans,J. and Dorr, Bonnie J} }