%0 Report %D 2011 %T Understanding Scientific Literature Networks: An Evaluation of Action Science Explorer %A Gove,R. %A Dunne,C. %A Shneiderman, Ben %A Klavans,J. %A Dorr, Bonnie J %X 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’s usefulness for custom exploration goals. This paper concludes by describing ASE’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. %I University of Maryland at College Park %8 2011/// %G eng