Chen, S., & Macredie, R. (2010). Web-based interaction: A review of three important human factors International Journal of Information Management DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2010.02.009

I’m initially sceptical about all review articles as they often offer the pressed research scientist the opportunity to just publish a background literature review without any further insight into the issues that are being raised. I’m happy to say that this paper is not one of those in fact it provides a model for how a good literature review should be conducted. It has a number of definite outcomes, it is short and succinct, and the method used to obtain the literature is open and explicit. Another aspect which I also think is good about this paper is that section 6 discusses limitations and future needs and really pulls apart the different papers discussing the inconsistency of results between them and the lack of mixed methods used. They conclude that:

The main results from the analysis include that: (a) females have more disorientation problems than males; (b) flexible paths are more beneficial to experts while structured content is more useful to novices; and (c) Field Dependent and Field Independent users prefer to employ different search strategies.

The work is published in the International Journal of Information Management with an Impact Factor: 1.043 and a 5-Year Impact Factor: 1.316 (in the UK this means that this is a good CS research journal).

It seems to me that research based literature surveys of this type fill a hole within the current scientific practice certainly within the human factors and Web ergonomics domains. In these domains replication and reanalysis by independent third parties is often not undertaken, there seems to be a low scientific value for this kind of work. It seems that in HCI the ability to replicate experiments is not possible because there are no peer reviewed routes for data publication. This inability to replicate experiments due to a lack of public data means that HCI does not strictly follow the scientific method, and as such is sometimes seen as not rigorous.

This type of research literature review goes some way towards plugging this gap because: the authors are independent; papers under investigation are often conducted in isolation from each other; the results may support or refute each other’s work; often different methods are used and so, holistically, we could argue that there is a mix methodology at play; and finally, the results of the analysis are concrete. Further, if authors have investigated their paper corpus in more detail (as these authors have) then limitations and inconsistent results are brought to the fore. This enables us to discount certain pieces of work based on these inconsistencies, or identified disparities, with a corpus of research papers all purporting to investigate similar phenomenon.