Collaborative Literature Search System: An Intelligence Amplification Method for Systematic Literature Search

In this paper, we present a method for systematic literature search based on the symbiotic partnership between the human researcher and intelligent agents. Using intelligence amplification, we leverage the calculation power of computers to quickly and thoroughly extract data, calculate measures, and visualize relationships between scientific documents with the ability of domain experts to perform qualitative analysis and creative reasoning. Thus, we create a foundation for a collaborative literature search system (CLSS) intended to aid researches in performing literature reviews, especially for interdisciplinary and evolving fields of science for which keyword-based literature searches result in large collections of documents beyond humans’ ability to process or the extensive use of filters to narrow the search output risks omitting relevant works. Within this article, we propose a method for CLSS and demonstrate its use on a concrete example of a literature search for a review of the literature on human-machine symbiosis.