Patterns of Contact and Communication in Scientific Research Collaboration

Motivation: scientific research is a social activity and its success lies upon the idea that collaboration leads to better results. However, physical proximity is vital for this to happen.

Problem: desire to understand how scientific researchers work together and what allows them to succeed and how physical proximity aids the research process. What principles can be created in order to make distributed collaboration more similar to collocated collaboration.

Approach, Evaluation and Results:

Three user studies:

1) Phone interview with scientists where they explained how they performed collaboration.

2) Survey to psychologists where they described the production and evaluation of their articles.

3) An archival study looking to predict who would work with who among members of a large research community. Results showed that the closer proximity, the more likely they were to collaborate.

Effects of Physical Proximity:

Choice of collaborators requires mutual benefit, intellectual compatibility and ease of contact. Physical proximity leads to more collaboration regardless of whether or not they are in the same department (although being in the same department led to higher percentages).

Importance of Informal Communication:

Proximity was strongly related to the amount of communication during the panning and writing stages of the research process.

Quality of Communication:

Physical proximity allows for two way interactions that involve more than one sensory channel, which are important during the initiation and planning stages of a project, mainly leading to develop common interests between them.

Cost of Communication:

Closer proximity means lower cost, and allows a much more efficient management.

Implications for Technology for Collaborative Work:

The goal should be to increase frequency and quality and decrease cost of interactions among collaborators. Virtual proximity might be a way to overcome limitations of physical proximity. Interaction is a vital aspect and tools require to support it, along with corresponding feedback.

(1) There have to be communication tools that facilitate planned, unplanned, and delayed interactions.

(2) Tools to minimize the overhead inherent in multi-person work.

(3) Task-oriented tools designed to facilitate the completion and integration of specific work products.

What I liked about the paper:

I found this paper to be very comprehensive and the authors really took the time to explore how people work in groups and then see how we can use these principles to facilitate distributed collaboration and make it more similar to a collocated collaboration.

What I didn’t like about the paper:

I felt it took too long explaining their studies and the analysis for it, and I felt that a lot of the theory, although necessary was extremely obvious. I do like, however that they established a solid argument.

How this paper inspires my work:

I actually feel I got most out of the paper at the end, and I have come to understand that collaboration systems have to be based on a specific task so that they can work best.