Searcher heterogeneity in collaborative information seeking within the context of work tasks

In this paper we present an overview over a doctoral thesis project emphasizing the planned research and methodology. The thesis project focuses on Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) with a core interest in searcher heterogeneity. A special field of interest is the way how different personalities interact in a collaborative search scenario and if heterogeneous groups perform better or worse than homogenous groups. The goal is to provide a description of group performance in CIS and suggestions for the design of collaborative search tools.