Collaborative and Distributed E‐research: Innovations in Technologies, Strategies and Applications

Citation

Mesquita, A. (2013), "Collaborative and Distributed E‐research: Innovations in Technologies, Strategies and Applications", Online Information Review, Vol. 37 No. 1, pp. 146-147. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521311311676

Collaboration is considered important in several situations, including research and knowledge development. Often this collaboration is ubiquitous and requires a common vocabulary among participants and the technology to build bridges between them, even though they may be separated in time or space. Technology means change or dynamic transformation and needs to be updated on a regular basis. What happens when we try to combine technology with research? We have e‐research. As the authors say, “e‐research should refer to any kind of collaborative research activity throughout the internet, in any discipline or field”.

A quick internet search (September 2012) returned more than 1.6 billion results for “e‐research”. When combined with “collaboration” the number reduced to 710 million (still a huge figure), and when combined with “distributed” there were still more than five million results. The same search in Amazon returned more than 84,000 results. This means that the market already has at least a few titles concerning this topic, and there is probably room for a few more.

This work follows a standard IGI format: the pre‐textual matter includes the Editorial Advisory Board and list of reviewers, a table of contents and detailed table of contents, a foreword and preface. In the opinion of this reviewer the organisation of content is not clear; it was expected that looking at the table of contents and then the detailed table of contents would give a better overview of the book's organisation than it actually did.

The 16 chapters/articles in the book are organised around two generic themes, which are noted only in the Preface. Theme 1 includes eight chapters dealing with topics such as collaboration and its different types and relation to Web 2.0. Specifically, why do researchers collaborate and what kind of infrastructures do they need? Theme 2, also with eight chapters, focuses on applications and case studies concerning collaboration and e‐research.

At the end of each chapter there is a list of references and list of key words and definitions. The chapters vary considerably in length and level of scholarship; some chapters are interesting enough to be read by experts in the field, others are not. The post‐textual part contains a full list of references (offered in parallel with the bibliographic references at the end of each chapter), details of the contributors and a final index.

All in all, this book could be of relevance to academics concerned with distributed collaboration and e‐research. Since the chapters have been written by researchers from around the world, this collection gives a rich and broad perspective on the topic and its applications.