  From more than half a century ago indexing scientific articles has been
studied intensively to provide a more efficient data retrieval and to conserve
researchers invaluable time. In the last two decades with the emergence of the
World Wide Web and the rapid growth in the number of scientific documents
online many academic databases and search engines were launched with almost
similar structure in order to reduce the difficulty in finding, relating and
sorting of the existing scientific documents published online. The dramatic
increase of the scientific documents in the last few years makes it necessary
that the retrieved information by the search engines be analyzed and more
organized and interpretable representation be displayed to the users.
Information visualization is a great way for exploration of large and complex
data sets, therefore it can be a natural candidate for the purpose of
generating more comprehensible search results for the citation and academic
databases. In this survey the usage pattern of the participants and their
demands and ideas for the existence of other beneficial methods for literature
review has been questioned and the results are quantitatively analyzed.
