Supporting Novice Researchers in Domain Familiarization – A Question-Guided Research Community Map Creation and Reflection Tool

Abstract

The first step to starting research is to familiarize with the research field, which is a difficult task for non-experts. They usually do not know which exact information to gather or which strategy to follow. There exists some literature on supporting them by means of guidelines, visualizations and critical thinking. However, they must be supported such that they can form their own strategies to objectively evaluate the research field. Therefore, a tool was developed to help non-experts identify which information to gather, structure the gathered information by means of a visualization and perform the task in a time-efficient manner. Finally, a user study was conducted to investigate the validity of the proposed approach. Results show that the developed software tool supports non-experts in their literature review process by providing them with an overview of the research field and making the process time-efficient.