Abstract Scientific novelty drives the efforts to invent new vaccines and solutions during the pandemic. First‐time collaboration and international collaboration are two pivotal channels to expand teams' search activities for a broader scope of resources required to address the global challenge, which might facilitate the generation of novel ideas. Our analysis of 98,981 coronavirus papers suggests that scientific novelty measured by the BioBERT model that is pretrained on 29 million PubMed articles, and first‐time collaboration increased after the outbreak of COVID‐19, and international collaboration witnessed a sudden decrease. During COVID‐19, papers with more first‐time collaboration were found to be more novel and international collaboration did not hamper novelty as it had done in the normal periods. The findings suggest the necessity of reaching out for distant resources and the importance of maintaining a collaborative scientific community beyond nationalism during a pandemic.

Abstract Power dynamics influence every aspect of scientific collaboration. Team power dynamics can be measured by team power level and team power hierarchy. Team power level is conceptualized as the average level of the possession of resources, expertise, or decision‐making authorities of a team. Team power hierarchy represents the vertical differences of the possessions of resources in a team. In Science of Science, few studies have looked at scientific collaboration from the perspective of team power dynamics. This research examines how team power dynamics affect team impact to fill the research gap. In this research, all coauthors of one publication are treated as one team. Team power level and team power hierarchy of one team are measured by the mean and Gini index of career age of coauthors in this team. Team impact is quantified by citations of a paper authored by this team. By analyzing over 7.7 million teams from Science (e.g., Computer Science, Physics), Social Sciences (e.g., Sociology, Library & Information Science), and Arts & Humanities (e.g., Art), we find that flat team structure is associated with higher team impact, especially when teams have high team power level. These findings have been repeated in all five disciplines except Art, and are consistent in various types of teams from Computer Science including teams from industry or academia, teams with different gender groups, teams with geographical contrast, and teams with distinct size.

In the Introduction to this special issue on the Social Informatics of Knowledge, the editors of the issue reflect on the history of the term "social informatics" and how the articles in this issue both reflect and depart from the original concept. We examine how social informatics researchers have studied knowledge, computerization, and the workplace, and how all of those have evolved over time. We describe the process by which articles were included, how they help us understand the field of social informatics scholarship today, and reflect briefly on what the future of the field holds.

The web encourages the constant creation and distribution of large amounts of information; it is also a valuable resource for understanding human behavior and communication. To take full advantage of the web as a research resource that extends beyond the consideration of snapshots of the present, however, it is necessary to begin to take web archiving much more seriously as an important element of any research program involving web resources. The ephemeral character of the web requires that researchers take proactive steps in the present to enable future analysis. Efforts to archive the web or portions thereof have been developed around the world, but these efforts have not yet provided reliable and scalable solutions. This article summarizes the current state of web archiving in relation to researchers and research needs. Interviews with researchers, archivists, and technologists identify the differences in purpose, scope, and scale of current web archiving practice, and the professional tensions that arise given these differences. Findings outline the challenges that still face researchers who wish to engage seriously with web content as an object of research, and archivists who must strike a balance reflecting a range of user needs.