Collaboration is often a critical aspect of scientific research, which is dominated by complex problems, rapidly changing technology, dynamic growth of knowledge, and highly specialized areas of expertise. An individual scientist can seldom provide all of the expertise and resources necessary to address complex research problems. This paper describes collaboration among a group of scientists, and considers how their experiences are socially shaped. The scientists were members of a newly formed distributed, multi-disciplinary academic research center that was organized into four multi-disciplinary research groups. Each group had 14 to 34 members, including faculty, postdoctoral fellows and students, at four geographically dispersed universities. To investigate challenges that emerge in establishing scientific collaboration, data were collected about members' previous and current collaborative experiences, perceptions regarding collaboration, and work practices during the center's first year of operation. The data for the study includes interviews with members of the center, observations of videoconferences and meetings, and a center-wide sociometric survey. Data analysis has led to the development of a framework that identifies forms of collaboration that emerged among scientists (e.g., complementary and integrative collaboration) and associated factors, which influenced collaboration including personal compatibility, work connections, incentives, and infrastructure. These results may inform the specification of social and organizational practices, which are needed to establish collaboration in distributed, multi-disciplinary research centers.

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It is" widely acknowledged that design (and development) teams increasingly include participants from different domains who must explore and integrate their specialized knowledge in order to create innovative and competitive artefacts and reduce design and development costs. Thus communication, including integration of specialized knowledge and negotiation of differences among domain specialists, has emerged as a fundamental component of the design process. This paper presents 13 communication roles that emerged during four multidisciplinary design situations in the USA and Europe. These roles supported knowledge exploration and integration, collaboration, and task and project completion by filtering and providing information and negotiating differences across organizational, task, discipline and personal boundaries. Implications for design methods, tools and education are discussed.

This study investigates the use of criteria to assess relevant, partially relevant, and not-relevant documents. Study participants identified passages within 20 document representations that they used to make relevance judgments; judged each document representation as a whole to be relevant, partially relevant, or not relevant to their information need; and explained their decisions in an interview. Analysis revealed 29 criteria, discussed positively and negatively, that were used by the participants when selecting passages that contributed or detracted from a document's relevance. These criteria can be grouped into six categories: abstract (e.g., citability, informativeness), author (e.g., novelty, discipline, affiliation, perceived status), content (e.g., accuracy/validity, background, novelty, contrast, depth/scope, domain, citations, links, relevant to other interests, rarity, subject matter, thought catalyst), full text (e.g., audience, novelty, type, possible content, utility), journal/publisher (e.g., novelty, main focus, perceived quality), and personal (e.g., competition, time requirements). Results further indicate that multiple criteria are used when making relevant, partially relevant, and not-relevant judgments, and that most criteria can have either a positive or negative contribution to the relevance of a document. The criteria most frequently mentioned by study participants were content, followed by criteria characterizing the full text document. These findings may have implications for relevance feedback in information retrieval systems, suggesting that systems accept and utilize multiple positive and negative relevance criteria from users. Systems designers may want to focus on supporting content criteria followed by full text criteria as these may provide the greatest cost benefit.

Cost effective development of collaboration technology requires evaluation methods that consider group practices and can be used early in a system's life-cycle.To address this challenge we developed a survey to evaluate collaboration technology based on innovation dgusion theory[23].The theory proposes five attributes of innovations that influence technology adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability. Selecting items from existing surveys related to these attributes, we developed a prototype multi-scale survey to help evaluate whether using a system face-to-face or distributively influences study participants' attitudes towards system adoption. We have begun refining the survey instrument and report on this process, the proposed survey questions, and the reliability and validity of the survey instrument.