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The Internet has the potential to accelerate scientific problem solving by engaging a global pool of contributors. Existing approaches focus on broadcasting problems to many independent solvers. We investigate other approaches that may be advantageous by examining a community for mathematical problem solving -- MathOverflow -- in which contributors communicate and collaborate to solve new mathematical 'micro-problems' online. We contribute a simple taxonomy of collaborative acts derived from a process-level examination of collaborations and a quantitative analysis relating collaborative acts to solution quality. Our results indicate a diversity of ways in which mathematicians are reaching a solution, including by iteratively advancing a solution. A better understanding of such collaborative strategies can inform the design of tools to support distributed collaboration on complex problems.
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Yla Tausczik
University of Maryland, College Park
Aniket Kittur
Robert Morris University
Robert E. Kraut
AT&T (United States)
Carnegie Mellon University
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Analyzing shared references across papers
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Tausczik et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
synapsesocial.com/papers/6a0ecb8853f874f2b222c79d — DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531690