VisualBib(va): A Visual Analytics Platform for Authoring and Reviewing Bibliographies

Abstract

Researchers are daily engaged in bibliographic tasks concerning literature search and review, both in the role of authors of scientific papers and when they are reviewers or evaluators. Current indexing platforms poorly support the visual exploration and comparative metadata analysis coming from subsequent searches. To address these issues, we designed and realized VisualBib(va), an online visual analytics solution, where a visual environment includes analysis control, bibliography exploration, automatic metadata extraction, and metrics visualization for real-time scenarios. We introduce and discuss here the relevant functions that VisualBib(va) supports through one usage scenarios related to the creation of a bibliography.