1. Requirements for Systems that Optimize how Biomedical Scientists Choose Collaborators

The increasingly collaborative nature of biomedical science and the growing complexity of today's research projects challenge researchers to choose the most appropriate and best-qualified collaborators. To date, most collaborations are still established through traditional means, such as personal contact and searching the literature. However, this approach does not scale well in the face of large and growing pools of potential collaborators. Electronic systems, called expertise locating systems canpotentially ameliorate this situation, but to date have played only a minor role in helping scientists do so. This study used a comprehensive literature review and contextual inquiries and semistructured interviews with 30 medical scientists to develop a preliminary set of requirements for electronic systems designed to help optimize how biomedical researchers choose collaborators. The requirements include aspects such as comrehensive, complete and up- to-date online profiles that are easy to create and maintain; the ability to exploit social networks when searching for collaborators; information to help gauge the compatibility of personalities and work styles; modeling various aspects of ''proximity,'' which influences the success of collaborations; and recommendations for effective searching and making "non-intuitive" connections between researchers. The assumption of scarcity on which many existing expertise locating systems seem to be built is not supported by our results. Researchers primarily seem to be concerned with identifying the most promising collaborations, not with not being able to find collaborators. Clearly, one challenge for designing expertise locating systems is that seeking, evaluating and choosing scientific collaborators is a complex decision-making process that is poorly understood. Therefore, future work should validate the preliminary requirements we developed, further describe and analyze the dynamics of collaboration decisions among biomedical scientists, and articulate implications for system design.