Enhancing Reading Strategies by Exploring A Theme-based Approach to Literature Surveys

Searching large digital repositories can be extremely frustrating, as common list-based formats encourage users to adopt a convenience-sampling approach that favours chance discovery and random search, over meaningful exploration. We have designed a methodology that allows users to visually and thematically explore corpora, while developing personalised holistic reading strategies. We describe the results of a three-phase qualitative study, in which experienced researchers used our interactive visualisation approach to analyse a set of publications and select relevant themes and papers. Using in-depth semi-structured interviews and stimulated recall, we found that users: (i) selected papers that they otherwise would not have read, (ii) developed a more coherent reading strategy, and (iii) understood the thematic structure and relationships between papers more effectively. Finally, we make six design recommendations to enhance current digital repositories that we have shown encourage users to adopt a more holistic and thematic research approach.