Overview editorial

The recent trend towards increased scientific collaboration, although accelerated by the popularity of social media and further exacerbated by the exoflood of big data, is not a unique phenomenon. The need to collaborate has its roots in the very development of human knowledge, in the human urge, and perhaps social necessity, to characterize and share information. Although collaboration has been a factor in research for centuries, we have seen an explosion of the study and characterization of the role of collaboration in science in the last few decades. In his tribute to Belver C. Griffith at Drexel University [1], Gene Garfield cites Henry Small’s canonical paper on co-citation in JASIS in 1973 [2]. He says “Closely related to the subject of co-citation is that of bibliographic coupling. . . . As will be shown, in later years, bibliographic coupling was essentially displaced by co-citation clustering as a tool for mapping science”. “Co-citation analysis has had an enormous and measurable impact on the field of information science itself as well as outside the field by scholars who have used it as a tool for mapping their disciplines or specialties”. As Garfield parlayed his work into the creation of Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and later into the ISI Web of Science, we see the impact of this work on the entire gamut of science. We have also seen a plethora of articles on science mapping in scientific and medical journals as well as journals dedicated to scientometrics such as Scientometrics (http://www.springer.com/computer/ database+management+%26+information+retrieval/journal/11192), Journal of Scientometric Research (http://www.jscires.org/), Cybermetrics (http://cybermetrics.cindoc.csic.es/) and several others. Scientific collaboration at an organizational level is also present in the virtual environment in organizations such as CENDI (http://www.cendi.gov/) which is an interagency working group of senior scientific and technical information (STI) managers from the 15 US federal agencies that are responsible for more than 97% of the US federal research and development budget. And finally we see how the rapid advances in information technology, which have enabled the new mode of data driven science, have created more opportunities and, indeed, more imperatives for collaboration. This issue of Information Services and Use features articles, drivers and projects that support scientific collaboration across a variety of research organizations with special emphasis on the role of social media and big data in scientific collaboration. While the domain of most of these papers is largely centered on scientific research that is sponsored by US federal government agencies in the fields of energy and defense, we believe that the trends and observations discussed are extensible to most other areas of scientific research. The first article, “Status of the adoption of social media in the scientific research community” (Coppock and Davis), takes a broad view of the current status of the use and role of Social Networking by