Intelligent Scientific Authoring Tools: Interactive Data Mining for Constructive Uses of Citation Networks

Many powerful methods and tools exist for extracting meaning from scientific publications, their texts, and their citation links. However, existing proposals often neglect a fundamental aspect of learning: that understanding and learning require an active and constructive exploration of a domain. In this paper, the authors describe a new method and a tool that use data mining and interactivity to turn the typical search and retrieve dialogue, in which the user asks questions and a system gives answers, into a dialogue that also involves sense-making, in which the user has to become active by constructing a bibliography and a domain model of the search term(s).