Towards Effortless Navigation of Scientific-Literature Screen Reading for Biocuration
Creators: name: , Ghosh
name: Mueller
name: Wittig
name: Rey
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Biocuration Cognitive Ergonomics

description: Presentation for the 1st UK Local Biocuration Conference. Abstract: Background: the exponential growth of bio-literature has stirred the need for<br> digitization of the biocuration processes. In this context, it is observed that screen<br> reading of electronic documents paces up the whole process and also induces<br> collaborative annotation in biocuration1. The usability experiences of screen-reading in<br> the biocuration context are still an under-explored area. In other contexts, studies<br> found that cumbersome navigational issues hamper intensive reading. It results in<br> lower reading speeds (and thus, slower understanding) and fatigue when reading for<br> an extended period, which leads to an increment in curation cost. On the other side,<br> studies found that improvement of the organization of the electronic document can<br> facilitate faster reading and understanding2.<br> Objective: To our knowledge, this is the first and preliminary usability experience study<br> to observe the effect of the navigation through the electronic document structure for<br> the biocuration task.<br> Method: We conduct a curation task with the five curators for eighty papers in front of<br> an eye tracker. We collect the level of difficulty on the Likert scale from the participants<br> and their preferences for document structure. We explore different features for our<br> statistical and correlation analysis: errors made by curators (checked by the other two<br> expert curators), efforts made by the curators measured using an eye tracker. We<br> used several eye tracker features, namely, time spent for reading, time spent for<br> navigation, top-down reading time, bottom-up reading time, reading speed, fixation<br> duration at different parts of the document, and pupillary responses.<br> Result: We find that the concurrent rhetorical and document structure facilitates fast<br> reading. In this case, the navigational effort comes down significantly, especially for<br> the experienced curators. It implies from this study that concurrent rhetorical structure3<br> and document layout facilitate reading for digital biocuration. While in these<br> experiment we did not see direct signs for explicit structural weaknesses of the paper,<br> we are planning to investigate the impact of structural changes on the readiblity of<br> papers. The key difficulty in this work is obtaining sufficiently large group of test<br> persons able to read complex scientific publications.<br> 1 W3C Web Annotation Working Group. (2022, April 4). To enable a conversation over the world’s<br> knowledge: Hypothesis Mission. https://web.hypothes.is<br> 2 Hornbæk, K., &amp; Frøkjær, E. (2003). Reading patterns and usability in visualizations of electronic<br> documents. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 10(2), 119-149.<br> 3 Teufel, S., Siddharthan, A., &amp; Batchelor, C. (2009, August). Towards domain-independent<br> argumentative zoning: Evidence from chemistry and computational linguistics. In Proceedings of the<br> 2009 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (pp. 1493-1502).