Garden of Papers: Finding, Reading, and Organizing Research Papers in a Visual, Integrated, and Flexible Workspace

Writing a research paper requires significant time and effort to find, read, and organize many related papers, which are complex and intensive knowledge tasks. We present Garden of Papers, a novel sketch-based interactive system that allows users to perform these tasks quickly and easily on a 2D canvas. Users can intuitively create paper nodes and citation links, naturally accumulate thoughts onto them, and flexibly expand and restructure them, progressively shaping their personalized node-link diagrams of related papers. We first conducted a short-term lab study (4 participants, 1 week) using a proof-of-concept system. Based on the findings from this study, we refined the system and conducted a long-term in-the-wild study (12 participants, 4 weeks). From these studies, we quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that our system’s visual, integrated, and flexible workspace facilitates 9 usage patterns that enhance real-world literature reviews. We describe these patterns using gardening metaphors, emphasizing how literature review tools grounded in visual thinking and spatial memory can help researchers not only make sense of, but also actively cultivate their evolving research landscapes.