On key bespoke tools to support electronic academic document discovery

Abstract

Publishing in academic journals and conferences has become faster, and easier with the ability to edit and submit documents electronically. With the increase of publications also come negative effects such as that of information overload and elevated discovery time of relevant resources. An information seeker often wades through several documents in order to find relevant publications having to either select known repositories for their search or utilizing generic search sources which network to several online repositories. Even with the advances in interactive systems, information seekers still carry out a mostly textual search from input to returned results. Several tools have been created by researchers in order to assist the seekers in their visual academic document triage activities but very few have been successfully implemented in actual discovery of electronic publications. With electronic publishing increasing dramatically, we recognize the paramount importance for these tools to be improved and integrated within environments to assist the seekers. In this work, we present an overview of key bespoke tools purpose built for achieving this document selection tasks. Using this work as a reference we hope to encourage structured and novel approaches to creating triage tools and improve the discovery process of electronic academic document publications.