An increasing amount of heterogeneous information about scientific research is becoming available on-line. This potentially allows users to explore the information from multiple perspectives and derive insights and not just raw data about a topic of interest. However, most current scientific information search systems lag behind this trend; being text-based, they are fundamentally incapable of dealing with multimedia data. An even more important limitation is that their information environments are information-centric and therefore are not suitable if insights are desired. Towards this goal, in this paper, we describe the design of a system, called ResearchExplorer, which facilitates exploring multimedia scientific data to gain insights. This is accomplished by providing an interaction environment for insights where users can explore multimedia scientific information sources. The multimedia information is united around the notion of research event and can be accessed in a unified way....