  In order to help scholars understand and follow a research topic, significant
research has been devoted to creating systems that help scholars discover
relevant papers and authors. Recent approaches have shown the usefulness of
highlighting relevant authors while scholars engage in paper discovery.
However, these systems do not capture and utilize users' evolving knowledge of
authors. We reflect on the design space and introduce ComLittee, a literature
discovery system that supports author-centric exploration. In contrast to
paper-centric interaction in prior systems, ComLittee's author-centric
interaction supports curation of research threads from individual authors,
finding new authors and papers with combined signals from a paper recommender
and the curated authors' authorship graphs, and understanding them in the
context of those signals. In a within-subjects experiment that compares to an
author-highlighting approach, we demonstrate how ComLittee leads to a higher
efficiency, quality, and novelty in author discovery that also improves paper
discovery.
