Lessons Learned from Users Reading Highlighted Abstracts in a Digital Library

Authors. Dagmar Kern, Daniel Hienert, Katrin Angerbauer, Tilman Dingler, Pia Borlund

Venue. CHIIR (2019) Short Paper

Type. Short Paper

Materials. DOI PDF

Abstract. Finding relevant documents is essential for researchers of all disciplines. We investigated an approach for supporting searchers in their relevance decision in a digital library by automatically highlighting the most important keywords in abstracts. We conducted an eye-tracking study with 25 subjects and observed very different search and reading behavior which lead to diverse results. Some of the participants liked that highlighted abstracts accelerate their relevance decision, while others found that they disturb the reading flow. What many agree on is that the quality of highlighting is crucial for trust and system credibility.

@inproceedings{10.1145/3295750.3298950,
    title        = {Lessons Learned from Users Reading Highlighted Abstracts in a Digital Library},
    author       = {Kern, Dagmar and Hienert, Daniel and Angerbauer, Katrin and Dingler, Tilman and Borlund, Pia},
    year         = {2019},
    booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval},
    publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    series       = {CHIIR '19},
    pages        = {271–275},
    doi          = {10.1145/3295750.3298950},
    url          = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3295750.3298950},
    abstract     = {Finding relevant documents is essential for researchers of all disciplines. We investigated an approach for supporting searchers in their relevance decision in a digital library by automatically highlighting the most important keywords in abstracts. We conducted an eye-tracking study with 25 subjects and observed very different search and reading behavior which lead to diverse results. Some of the participants liked that highlighted abstracts accelerate their relevance decision, while others found that they disturb the reading flow. What many agree on is that the quality of highlighting is crucial for trust and system credibility.},
    numpages     = {5},
    keywords     = {user study, highlighting, reading behavior, relevance judgment}
}