Research Interests: Their Dynamics, Structures and Applications in Web Search Refinement

For most scientists, their research interests are dynamically changing all the time. Through an analysis of research interests, we find that all the changes are with some characteristics. Plus, the research interests in the dynamic changing process are not isolated, instead, they are interconnected as a whole to form a holistic structure. We introduce some measurement parameters to track and detect the evolution process, we analyze the structural and dynamic characteristics of research interests through statistical analysis, and we also investigate on how they affect each other. As a possible application, we use observed characteristics of research interests to refine literature search on the Web, which shows that diverse user needs can be satisfied using various observations from research interests as constraints for vague queries. Such effort may provide some hints and various methods to support personalized search, and can be considered as a step forward user centric knowledge retrieval on the Web.