'Too Late to Collaborate' : Challenges to the Discovery of in-Progress Research

Abstract

Identifying the ongoing research in one's field is an essential yet time-intensive information seeking task. Today's digital libraries support researchers in the search and discovery of published academic research. However, they are unable to support researchers in the discovery of ongoing research, i.e., research that has not yet been published. The discovery of ongoing research thus remains a manual information seeking task lacking standardized processes or automated support systems. We present findings from an initial qualitative study on how computer science researchers from four disciplines currently go about identifying ongoing research projects within their fields and the challenges they face. A major challenge we identify is what we term the discovery-confidentiality trade-off. On the one hand, researchers express a need to discover ongoing research projects in their domain to identify collaboration partners and to avoid performing duplicate research. However, at the same time, researchers are hesitant to reveal details about their own in-progress research for fear of idea plagiarism. We discuss several key factors influencing this trade-off, such as trust and timeliness. We argue that these factors must be accounted for in the design of future academic search and recommendation solutions to support researchers in the timely identification of ongoing research.