Understanding and Supporting Academic Literature Review Workflows with LitSense
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is increasingly difficult for researchers to navigate and reach an understanding of a growing body of literature in a field of research. While past works in HCI and data visualization sought to support such activities, few investigated how these workflows are conducted in practice and how practices change in view of support tools. This work contributes a more holistic understanding of this space via a user-centered approach encompassing (a) a formative study on literature review practices of 15 researchers which informed (b) the design of LitSense, a proof-of-concept tool to support literature review workflows, and (c) a week-long study with 12 researchers performing a literature review with Litsense.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.214 | 0.385 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.035 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".