Host Organisation: University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

The ability to search and browse through large document repositories in an exploratory fashion offers the potential to organize content, facilitate workflows (like system reviews), enable new discoveries, and help sense-making activities. The focus of this PhD will be to study the information seeking behaviors of academics and create tools that help support the tasks. The main objectives of the project will be:

• To describe and model common search and seeking based workflows performed by academics
• To build and create a series of components to enable the construction of configurable search and processing pipelines, and
• To build and evaluate an exploratory, search and filtering interface for academic search.

The project is expected to result in the development of a number of prototype applications which will be evaluated with end-users providing evidence regarding the utility and usefulness of novel, configurable search and filtering interfaces. The empirical estimates of the costs and benefits will help to inform theory and method development (in other projects, e.g. Project 11 and Project 12) as well as provide empirical evidence for conceptual workflow models used in academic search tasks (e.g. literature reviews, monitoring, landscaping, etc).