Usable bibliographic software

Abstract

Handling thousands of papers can be a tiring work especially for the researchers. Hence, bibliographic software was created in order to help researchers organise manage, and annotate their references digitally. Vast amounts of research on bibliographic software have been conducted, especially in database or information retrieval but there is a lack of research on interface. A usable interface facilitates researchers in organising reference and making citations. A usable interface should follow usability goals and standards. To ensure the usability of bibliographic software interface, an initial evaluation of the interface is carried out. Bibliographic software evaluation framework is constructed in order to evaluate the bibliographic interface. Therefore, to determine the usability of the interface in this study, a heuristic evaluation was conducted. A Xerox Form was used as the heuristic tools in these evaluations. Only two out of thirteen elements in the Xerox Form are discussed in this paper i.e.- visibility of the system status and match between system and the real world. The evaluation found several problems regarding the interface of the software. This paper ends by suggesting the improvement of bibliographic software interface by using heuristic evaluation.