Scholarly Research Process: Investigating the Effects of Link Type and Directionality
HT '09: Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, New York, NY, USA, ACM, (July 2009)Abstract
Hypertext research has discovered new ways to explore, represent and visualise data and has led to many improvements in the usability and usefulness of systems. However, in the field of scholarly writing research, several studies discuss the need for improving the current state of affairs 182429. This research aimed to investigate whether typed and/or bi-directional links have an effect on users performance and confidence when undertaking a literature survey 18, considered one of the phases of a scholarly writing process 29. Two empirical studies were conducted - a survey and a formal experiment, and results showed that both typed and bi-directional links had significant effect on users performance and confidence when undertaking common early scholarly writing tasks, specifically benefiting tasks relating to surveying existing literature.
