  Exposure to ideas in domains outside a scientist's own may benefit her in
reformulating existing research problems in novel ways and discovering new
application domains for existing solution ideas. While improved performance in
scholarly search engines can help scientists efficiently identify relevant
advances in domains they may already be familiar with, it may fall short of
helping them explore diverse ideas \textit{outside} such domains. In this paper
we explore the design of systems aimed at augmenting the end-user ability in
cross-domain exploration with flexible query specification. To this end, we
develop an exploratory search system in which end-users can select a portion of
text core to their interest from a paper abstract and retrieve papers that have
a high similarity to the user-selected core aspect but differ in terms of
domains. Furthermore, end-users can `zoom in' to specific domain clusters to
retrieve more papers from them and understand nuanced differences within the
clusters. Our case studies with scientists uncover opportunities and design
implications for systems aimed at facilitating cross-domain exploration and
inspiration.

Information Retrieval;Computation and Language