Research agenda for social and collaborative information seeking

•Many situations in information-intensive works require people to collaborate and use social ties.•Social and collaborative dimensions of information seeking have recently been recognized and studied extensively.•Investigating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking together opens up new opportunities.•Social and collaborative information seeking (SCIS) brings in thoughts and methods from a diverse set of fields.•SCIS could help address challenges in several domains, including education, health, and information retrieval.

Scholars in diverse fields of inquiry have identified the need to expand individual-based information seeking and behavior models and systems to incorporate social as well as collaborative dimensions. However, the research areas of Social Information Seeking (SIS) and Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) have been largely disconnected from one another despite a few notable attempts to study them under one umbrella. Researchers in these communities have recently realized the value of bringing SIS and CIS together for two main reasons: often it is impossible to separate social and collaborative dimensions in a project; and by considering these two aspects of information seeking, we may be able to support human information behavior in ways not previously possible. A brief synthesis of work in the domains of SIS and CIS is presented here. Then, an integrated view is presented to consider Social and Collaborative Information Seeking (SCIS) as an intersection and extension of SIS and CIS. Benefits of this approach are discussed and the integrated view is used as the basis to present a research agenda that outlines opportunities and challenges unique to SCIS.