Computer users spend time every day interacting with digital files and folders, including downloading, moving, naming, navigating to, searching for, sharing, and deleting them. Such file management has been the focus of many studies across various fields, but has not been explicitly acknowledged nor made the focus of dedicated review. In this article we present the first dedicated review of this topic and its research, synthesizing more than 230 publications from various research domains to establish what is known and what remains to be investigated, particularly by examining the common motivations, methods, and findings evinced by the previously furcate body of work. We find three typical research motivations in the literature reviewed: understanding how and why users store, organize, retrieve, and share files and folders, understanding factors that determine their behavior, and attempting to improve the user experience through novel interfaces and information services. Relevant conceptual frameworks and approaches to designing and testing systems are described, and open research challenges and the significance for other research areas are discussed. We conclude that file management is a ubiquitous, challenging, and relatively unsupported activity that invites and has received attention from several disciplines and has broad importance for topics across information science.

Although many challenges of managing computer files have been identified in past studies -- and many alternative prototypes made -- the scale and structure of personal file collections remain relatively unknown. We studied 348 such collections, and found they are typically considerably larger in scale (30-190 thousand files) and structure (folder trees twice taller and many times wider) than previously thought, which suggests files and folders are used now more than ever despite advances in Web storage, desktop search, and tagging. Data along many measures within and across collections were log normally distributed, indicating that personal collections resemble imbalanced, group-made collections and confirming the intuition that personal information management behaviour varies greatly. Directions for the generation of test collections and other future research are discussed.

With the significant development of China's economy and scientific activity, its scientific publication activity is experiencing a period of rapid growth. However, measuring China's research output remains a challenge because Chinese scholars may publish their research in either international or national journals, yet no bibliometric database covers both the Chinese and English scientific literature. The purpose of this study is to compare Web of Science (WoS) with a Chinese bibliometric database in terms of authors and their performance, demonstrate the extent of the overlap between the two groups of Chinese most productive authors in both international and Chinese bibliometric databases, and determine how different disciplines may affect this overlap. The results of this study indicate that Chinese bibliometric databases, or a combination of WoS and Chinese bibliometric databases, should be used to evaluate Chinese research performance except in the few disciplines in which Chinese research performance could be assessed using WoS only.

Many large digital collections are organized by sorting their items into topics and arranging these topics hierarchically, such as those displayed in a tree view. The resulting information organization structures mitigate some of the challenges of searching digital information realms; however, the topic hierarchies are often large and complex, and thus difficult to navigate. Automated techniques have been shown to produce significantly smaller, simplified versions of existing topic hierarchies while preserving access to the majority of the collection, but these simplified topic hierarchies have never been tested with human participants, and so it is not clear what effect simplification would have on the exploration and use of such structures for browsing and retrieval. This study partly addresses this gap by performing a comparative test with three groups of university students (N=62) performing ten topic hierarchy exploration tasks using one of three versions of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) hierarchy: 1) the original LCSH hierarchy, acting as a baseline, 2) a shallower version of 1), and 3) a narrower version of 2). A quantitative analysis of measures of accuracy, time, and browsing shows that participants using the simplified trees were significantly more accurate and faster than those using the unmodified tree, and the narrower, balanced tree was also faster than the shallower tree. These results show that automated topic hierarchy simplification can facilitate the use of such hierarchies, which has implications for the development of information organization theory and human-information interaction techniques for similar information structures.

Many large digital collections are currently organized by subject; although useful, these information organization structures are large and complex and thus difficult to browse. Current online tools and visualization prototypes show small, localized subsets and do not provide the ability to explore the predominant patterns of the overall subject structure. This study describes subject tree modifications that facilitate browsing for documents by capitalizing on the highly uneven distribution of real‐world collections. The approach is demonstrated on two large collections organized by the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Results show that the LCSH subject tree can be reduced to 49% of its initial complexity while maintaining access to 83% of the collection, and the MeSH tree can be reduced to 45% of its initial complexity while maintaining access to 97% of the collection. A simple solution to negate the loss of access is discussed. The visual impact is demonstrated by using traditional outline views and a slider control allowing searchers to change the subject structure dynamically according to their needs. This study has implications for the development of information organization theory and human–information interaction techniques for subject trees.

The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is a subject structure used to index large library collections throughout the world. Browsing a collection throughLCSHis difficult using current online tools in part because users cannot explore the structure using their existing experience navigating file hierarchies on their hard drives. This is due to inconsistencies in theLCSHstructure, which does not adhere to the specific rules defining tree structures. This article proposes a method to adapt theLCSHstructure to reflect a real‐world collection from the domain of science and engineering. This structure is transformed into a valid tree structure using an automatic process. The analysis of the resultingLCSHtree shows a large and complex structure. The analysis of the distribution of information within theLCSHtree reveals a power law distribution where the vast majority of subjects contain few information items and a few subjects contain the vast majority of the collection.

Abstract This review describes experimental designs (users, search tasks, measures, etc.) used by 31 controlled user studies of information visualization (IV) tools for textual information retrieval (IR) and a meta‐analysis of the reported statistical effects. Comparable experimental designs allow research designers to compare their results with other reports, and support the development of experimentally verified design guidelines concerning which IV techniques are better suited to which types of IR tasks. The studies generally use a within‐subject design with 15 or more undergraduate students performing browsing to known‐item tasks on sets of at least 1,000 full‐text articles or Web pages on topics of general interest/news. Results of the meta‐analysis (N= 8) showed no significant effects of the IV tool as compared with a text‐only equivalent, but the set shows great variability suggesting an inadequate basis of comparison. Experimental design recommendations are provided which would support comparison of existing IV tools for IR usability testing.