Understanding Communities of Practice to Support Collaborative Research

In this article, we present an overview of the relationship between communities of practice and collaborative research. We relate this to an observation of how information technologies could be used as a tool for cultivating research communities of practice. Our aim is to explore similarities between research as an activity developed and supported by communities and the concepts that have been developed by advocates of communities of practice. We focus our attention on research in the social sciences and how it can be improved with the support of community-enabling technologies.