Evaluating tagclouds for health-related information research.

This paper investigates the potential use of “tagclouds” for health-related research. Twelve researchers (experts in their field) participated in a user experiment using PubCloud. Findings indicate that results from PubCloud provide effective summaries, users are moderately satisfied, and tagclouds often throw-up unexpected (but useful) terms. Comments from participants fell into two main categories: technical functionality and visualisation of the output. It is expected that results from this study could help inform use of tagclouds for health information researchers, inform the uses of tagclouds in health informatics education, and feed into the design and development of applications involving tagcloud visualisations.