The area of collaborative search has experienced significant growth over the past couple of years in the number of research groups interested in the topic, and in the number of research papers being published in proceedings of respected conferences.

Interestingly, there is also a rash of “best paper” awards for this work. In chronological order of publication, the following papers related to collaborative search have received “best paper” designations.

• Pickens, J., Golovchinsky, G., Shah, C., Qvarfordt, P., and Back, M. (2008) Algorithmic mediation for collaborative exploratory search. In Proc. ACM SIGIR ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 315-322. (Best paper award)
• Joho, H., Hannah, D., and Jose, J. M. (2008) Comparing collaborative and independent search in a recall-oriented task. In: Proc. IIiX 2008, 89-96. (Best paper award)
• Paul, S. and Morris, M.R. (2009) CoSense: Enhancing Sensemaking for Collaborative Web Search. Proceedings of CHI 2009. (Best Paper nominee)
  

Congratulations to all the authors, and please let me know if I forgot to list your paper!