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Exploratory Search for Scientific Articles

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Abstract

It is intuitively clear that search for scientific publications often has many characteristics of exploratory search. The purpose of this paper is to formalize this intuitive understanding, explore which scientific search tasks can be classified as research search ones, what general approaches to the research search problem exist, and how they are implemented in specialized search engines for scientists. We overview the existing works that address the information-seeking behavior of scientists and a special variant of search called exploratory search. There are several types of search behavior typical for scientists; we show that most of them are exploratory ones. Exploratory search differs from information retrieval and requires special support from the search systems. We analyze seventeen search systems for academicians (from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science to ResearchGate) from the perspective of exploratory search support. We find that most of them do not go far beyond simple information retrieval, and there is room for further improvements, especially in collaborative search support.

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Notes

  1. https://www.acm.org/about-acm/class.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project no. 17-07-00978 A.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ivannikov Institute for System Programming, Russian Academy of Sciences, ul. Solzhenitsyna 25, 109004, Moscow, Russia

    Y. R. Nedumov & S. D. Kuznetsov

  2. Moscow State University, 119991, Moscow, Russia

    S. D. Kuznetsov

  3. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Institutskii per. 9, 141700, Dolgoprudnyi, Moscow oblast, Russia

    S. D. Kuznetsov

  4. National Research University Higher School of Economics, ul. Myasnitskaya 20, 101000, Moscow, Russia

    S. D. Kuznetsov

  5. Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, Stremyanny lane 36, 117997, Moscow, Russia

    S. D. Kuznetsov

Authors
  1. Y. R. Nedumov
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  2. S. D. Kuznetsov
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Correspondence to Y. R. Nedumov or S. D. Kuznetsov.

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Translated by Yu. Kornienko

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Nedumov, Y.R., Kuznetsov, S.D. Exploratory Search for Scientific Articles. Program Comput Soft 45, 405–416 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0361768819070089

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S0361768819070089

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