A Novel Approach for Cooperative Scientific Literature Search and Socialization

The scientific literature search is a crucial enabler for the research process and one of the most problematic and inefficient activities that researchers must face. Most University students never experience scientific literature search, although research is the primary mission of the universities and one of the major activities of their professors and a primary parameter for their careers. The aim of this paper is to i) present a new approach for scientific literature search based on virtual team collaboration, ii) explore the team dynamics of the knowledge building process in a virtual environment and, iii) propose a blog tool for open knowledge sharing both for experienced researchers and beginning students. An experiment on a collaborative scientific literature search on five virtual teams for a total of 25 students at the 2nd edition of the 2nd level Master in Valorization of different abilities and education research proposed by the CAFRE Interdepartmental Center for Lifelong Learning, Training and Education Research at Pisa University has been developed. The collaboration result is a Google Sites embedding individual blogs where each virtual team can build and share organized knowledge based on literature search.