Whetting the appetite of scientists: Producing summaries tailored to the citation context

The amount of scientific material available electronically is forever increasing. This makes reading the published litera- ture, whether to stay up-to-date on a topic or to get up to speed on a new topic, a dificult task. Yet, this is an activity in which all researchers must be engaged on a regular basis. Based on a user requirements analysis, we developed a new research tool, called the Citation-Sensitive In-Browser Sum- mariser (CSIBS), which supports researchers in this brows- ing task. CSIBS enables readers to obtain information about a citation at the point at which they encounter it. This infor- mation is aimed at enabling the reader to determine whether or not to invest the time in exploring the cited article fur- ther, thus alleviating information overload. CSIBS builds a summary of the cited document, bringing together meta- data about the document and a citation-sensitive preview that exploits the citation context to retrieve the sentences from the cited document that are relevant at this point. This paper brie y presents our user requirements analysis, then describes the system and, finally, discusses the observations from an initial pilot study. We found that CSIBS facilitates the relevancy judgment task, by increasing the users' self-reported confidence in making such judgements.