Guided Visual Analytics—A Visual Analytics Guidance Approach for Systematic Reviews in Research

Visual Analytics systems are often complex expert systems that require high expertise. The simplification of the interaction with such systems in order to make them usable for novices is one subject of current research works. One way to ease the user’s interaction with the systems is through guidance approaches. Guidance approaches aim to support the user while working with the system by providing targeted assistance. We present in this work a stepwise guidance approach for Visual Analytics. For that, we use the domain of literature search and exploration exemplary. The underlying system allows researchers to visually search and explore scientific publications and automatically generate systematic review protocols. To accomplish this, we present a stepwise visual guidance system approach that combines automatic steps and manual user validation to unify the systematic literature review (SLR) creation process. Based on a design study we conducted, we present our proposed AI-based assistant (MAIA) that assists users in the various steps required to create systematic literature reviews. According to the PRISMA statement, we describe the process of SLR creation exemplary and present the different screens that guide the user through SLR creation.