Ideality & Bio-Inspired Based Collaborative Bibliographic Search Method

Bibliographic search is a common entry point to any scientific work. It aims at gathering enough information to support the incoming thoughts. It is usually an unstructured process relying on both information retrieval and serendipity. Considering the search as an unstructured process, it could easily become a time consuming never ending process. In order to maximize the outcome of bibliographic search with limited time and resources, an approach is proposed. It focuses on how to structure such search without contradicting its need of serendipity thanks to different features. The first relies on the concept of Ideality. It aims at identifying and structuring the information to look for. The second feature focuses on identifying the scope and depth of the analysis related to any articles constituting the bibliography. These aspects are tackled thanks to an objective/subjective grading system with handling of the results inspired by the behavior of social insects. Another feature inspired by patent search (precision/recall indexes) focuses on identifying when to stop the article curation. Finally, parts of all these features can be coupled in order to generate a bibliographic search map. This map represents a means to share an overview of the work being done, allowing another person to take ownership of the bibliographic search. This feature provides the opportunity for structuring and strengthening collaborative bibliographic search approaches.