Patterns of Contact & Communication in Scientific Research Collaboration

Summary:
The authors of this paper describe the influence of physical proximity on the development of collaborative relationships between scientific researchers and on the execution of their work. Generally, this paper proves that the nature of collaborative work relationships can help to implement technologies to support collaborative research. Therefore, this paper is divided in two sections:

1. Examination of physical proximity: In this case, they examine the role of physical proximity in the collaborative process. There are some mechanisms underlying the relationship between proximity and collaboration. These mechanisms are the availability of frequent, high quality, and low-cost communication that facilitates the development of ideas and the execution of collaborative tasks. Thus, they research on the relationship between some research collaborations and physical proximity. Consequently, they prove that among researchers in different departments, pairs of researchers who were on the same floor with frequently talking to each other have more collaborations than the farther researchers. They also prove that high quality metric in informal communication is effective in collaboration between researchers. Finally, they show that the cost of communication is as important as the other factors. Obviously, this cost is nothing when researchers are physically close to each other; so, they have more collaborations in this way.
2. Implications for technology for collaborative work: The authors' view is that communication technologies that allow free-form interaction in real-time and time-shifted modes to substitute for, and even to augment, physical proximity are likely to yield great benefits. Therefore, they address the three needs of distributed work teams: communication tools, management tools, task-oriented tools. According to the mentioned metrics of physical proximity, they claim that the communication technology should be cheap, frequent, and spontaneous enough that collaborators can be in touch easily.

My Idea:
As this paper was as old as the two others, but I found it more academic. In introduction, I highlighted a sentence which was very nice for me: "Science is a fundamentally social process". I think that all the paper was based on this fact. The authors firstly examined the metrics of collaboration between researchers, then concluded that technology should have those metrics that is a good flow from real-worl facts to technology progress.