Towards Effortless Navigation of Scientific-Literature Screen Reading for Biocuration

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