Performance was determined by measuring the accuracy and inclusiveness of answers to questions about the article, and written summaries. Most readers did not read the entire articles in the time allotted. Readers of documents with only structural links had comprehension scores that were inversely proportional to their satisfaction ratings. No performance difference was detected. My overall objective is to develop and evaluate ways of automatically incorporating hypertext links into pre-existing scholarly journal articles.
Structural links are a way of making explicit some connections between parts of the text.
Definition links connect the use of a term, defined elsewhere in the document, to that definition. Links that connect parts of text that discuss similar things are semantic links. I distinguish several types of semantic links. I conducted an experiment to compare the performance of the links forged using these two systems. A within-subjects experimental design was used.