Exploring Distributed Synthesis: In-Progress Findings from Guided Tours of Scholarly Knowledge Synthesis Work Practices with A Distributed Lens

Synthesis — the construction of a new conceptual whole that advances understanding — is critical for research progress. Its current practice is also extremely laborious and costly. In this paper, we explore what fresh ideas CSCW might have to offer for making effective synthesis less painful and more commonplace. In particular, we draw on CSCW ideas around distributed sensemaking and integrated crowdsourcing to explore the idea of distributed synthesis: systems for sharing and reusing intermediate synthesis materials such as annotations and notes to kickstart and accelerate the synthesis process. We report in-progress findings from our analysis of in-depth guided tours of scholarly synthesis work practices, to bridge the gap between distributed sensemaking and integrated crowdsourcing (which has not yet been studied in the setting of scholarly synthesis) and scholarly synthesis workflows (which have not yet been analyzed from a distributed lens).