Scholarly Collaboration on the Academic Social Web

Collaboration among scholars has always been recognized as a fundamental feature of scientific discovery. The ever-increasing diversity among disciplines and complexity of research problems makes it even more compelling to collaborate in order to keep up with the fast pace of innovation and advance knowledge. Along with the rapidly developing Internet communication technologies and the increasing popularity of the social web, we have observed many important developments of scholarly collaboration on the academic social web. matioIn this book, we review the rapid transforn of scholarly collaboration on various academic social web platforms and examine how these platforms have facilitated academics throughout their research lifecycle--from forming ideas, collecting data, and authoring articles to disseminating findings. We refer to the term ＂academic social web platforms＂ in this book as a category of Web 2.0 tools or online platforms (such as CiteULike, Mendeley, Academia.edu, and ResearchGate) that enable and facilitate scholarly information exchange and participation. We will also examine scholarly collaboration behaviors including sharing academic resources, exchanging opinions, following each other’s research, keeping up with current research trends, and, most importantly, building up their professional networks. Inspired by the model developed Olson et al. [2000] on factors for successful scientific collaboration, our examination of the status of scholarly collaboration on the academic social web has four emphases: technology readiness, coupling work, building common ground, and collaboration readiness. Finally, we talk about the insights and challenges of all these online scholarly collaboration activities imposed on the research communities who are engaging in supporting online scholarly collaboration. This book aims to help researchers and practitioners understand the development of scholarly collaboration on the academic social web, and to build up an activecommunity of scholars who are interested in this topic.

Daqing He is an associate professor at the School of Information Sciences (iSchool), and associate professor at the Intelligent Systems Program, both of which are at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Prior joining the University of Pittsburgh in 2004, he served on the research faculties of the Robert Gordon University, Scotland and the University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, MD. His main research interests cover information retrieval (monolingual and multilingual), information access on the social web, adaptive web systems and user modeling, interactive retrieval interface design, web log mining and analysis, and research data management. Dr. He has been the Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-PI for more than ten research projects, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), University of Pittsburgh, and other agencies. He has published more than 120 articles in internationally recognized journals and conferences in these areas, which include Journal of Association for Information Science and Technology, Information Processing and Management, ACM Transaction on Information Systems, Journal of Information Science, ACM SIGIR, CIKM, WWW, CSCW, and so on. Dr. He has served as a member on the program committees for more than 30 major international conferences in the area of information retrieval and web technologies, and has been called upon to be a reviewer for many top-ranked international journals in the same areas. He services on the editorial board of SCI/SSCI indexed journals Internet Research and Aslib Journal of Information Management. WeiJeng is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Sciences (iSchool) at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research explores how people share information, data, and resources in the digital age. Given the increasing need in academic communities to manage a huge amount of data, her longterm research goal is to provide insights on improving research infrastructure for scholars in all disciplines, particularly social sciences, humanities, and related scholarly communities.