Exploring Practices, Challenges, and Design Implications for Citation Foraging, Management, and Synthesis

Citations play a crucial role in reinforcing knowledge construction, sparking new ideas, and fostering science communication.However, researchers often encounter difficulties in foraging, managing, and synthesizing citations amid the rapid growth of academic publications.To better understand researchers' practices and challenges in citation related activities, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 researchers in the fields of HCI and AI.Our key findings include: (1) researchers are unable to fully track and digest all relevant work; (2) current citation management tools fall short of meeting researchers' needs; (3) "cherry-picking" (write the statement first, then search for supporting references to strengthen its credibility and accuracy) is a common practice in citation synthesis; and (4) citation foraging, management, and synthesis workflows are disconnected and lack consistency.Our design implications provide insight into the development of interactive systems that more effectively support researchers in their citation activities.