iScholar: A Mobile Research Support System

Abstract

The daily lives of researchers have been influenced in many ways by technological developments, especially mobile technology. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the formal adaptation of mobile technology into scienti fic research. iScholar, a mobile information retrieval support and recommender system for supporting research activities, is presented. The objective of this thesis is to integrate the latest, particularly mobile, technology when building effective research tools. Ubiquitously available connectivity and new features of mobile devices make it possible to create more flexible and portable research support systems. As a result, advanced research support systems will bring more effi ciency and convenience when conducting scientifi c research. Web-based support systems are studied related to two dimensions - application and technology, and the same applies to mobile-based support systems. As such, the structure of this thesis consists of two parts - scientifi c research as an application domain and mobile technology as a technology dimension. Three research frameworks that are taken from previous studies are reviewed to understand the application domain. One particular framework, the research cycle, is selected for further consideration. Possible mobile support for each step of the chosen framework is identifi ed. The second part of the thesis addresses the technical details of how the system is designed and implemented. Literature review is considered as one of the most important research activities because it influences every aspect of the every aspect of the research process. Therefore, iScholar supports most steps of performing a literature review, such as searching and ltering resource databases, getting paper recommendations to read, and getting conferences/journals recommendations to target. The main functionalities of the proposed system are to retrieve publications as relevant as possible, recommend related papers to read, and recommend conferences to attend or submit papers to. By providing a useful tool, it is hoped that the system saves researcher's time and energy in carrying out research. ii