SearchIdea: An Idea Generation Tool to Support Creativity in Academic Search

Users searching for information in academic contexts often need to compare different perspectives, organize search results, and synthesize topics. To support people’s creative thinking processes while searching for academic information, we developed SearchIdea, a Web-based online tool, that enables users to actively interact with search results beyond evaluation and selection. Through its three primary features–search-results, SearchMapper, and IdeaMapper–SearchIdea allows users to add saved search results to SearchMapper for comparison, prioritization, and rearrangement. Using IdeaMapper, users can elicit keywords from search results, brainstorm, and organize ideas while identifying relationships among ideas. We also developed a baseline tool, IdeaPad, which provides users with a simple pad for writing and editing text. We then conducted an evaluation study with 58 students at a university in the United States. The study subjects were assigned to either SearchIdea or IdeaPad and performed two search tasks: (1) generating as many ideas as possible, and (2) selecting the best idea after generating multiple ideas. The results showed that subjects using SearchIdea entered more unique search terms, generated longer queries, and engaged with search results more actively than those who used IdeaPad. The SearchIdea users reported higher ratings for idea generation in terms of synthesizing and organizing ideas than did the IdeaPad users. The findings of our study provide insights into how an idea generation tool can connect search activities with creative thinking processes in order to generate more and better ideas.