Browsing is a collaborative process
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Collaborative information retrieval (CIR)
The New Review of Information Behaviour Research
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Evaluating implicit measures to improve web search
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Communications of the ACM
SearchTogether: an interface for collaborative web search
Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Communications of the ACM - The psychology of security: why do good users make bad decisions?
A survey of collaborative web search practices
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Algorithmic mediation for collaborative exploratory search
Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Comparing collaborative and independent search in a recall-oriented task
Proceedings of the second international symposium on Information interaction in context
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Beyond the search process - Exploring group members' information behavior in context
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue: Formal methods for information retrieval
Assessing the scenic route: measuring the value of search trails in web logs
Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Role-based results redistribution for collaborative information retrieval
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Exploring information seeking processes in collaborative search tasks
Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem - Volume 47
CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Spatial context in collaborative information seeking
Journal of Information Science
Collaborative search revisited
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Group-support for task-based information searching: a knowledge-based approach
Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Supporting exploratory people search: a study of factor transparency and user control
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Conference on information & knowledge management
Modeling search processes using hidden states in collaborative exploratory web search
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
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It is typically expected that when people work together, they can often accomplish goals that are difficult or even impossible for individuals. We consider this notion of the group achieving more than the sum of all individuals' achievements to be the synergic effect in collaboration. Similar expectation exists for people working in collaboration for information seeking tasks. We, however, lack a methodology and appropriate evaluation metrics for studying and measuring the synergic effect. In this paper we demonstrate how to evaluate this effect and discuss what it means to various collaborative information seeking (CIS) situations. We present a user study with four different conditions: single user, pair of users at the same computer, pair of users at different computers and co-located, and pair of users remotely located. Each of these individuals or pairs was given the same task of information seeking and usage for the same amount of time. We then combined the outputs of single independent users to form artificial pairs, and compared against the real pairs. Not surprisingly, participants using different computers (co-located or remotely located) were able to cover more information sources than those using a single computer (single user or a pair). But more interestingly, we found that real pairs with their own computers (co-located or remotely located) were able to cover more unique and useful information than that of the artificially created pairs. This indicates that those working in collaboration achieved something greater and better than what could be achieved by adding independent users, thus, demonstrating the synergic effect. Remotely located real teams were also able to formulate a wider range of queries than those pairs that were co-located or artificially created. This shows that the collaborators working remotely were able to achieve synergy while still being able to think and work independently. Through the experiments and measurements presented here, we have also contributed a unique methodology and an evaluation metric for CIS.