ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Scientific Teams: Models and Practices for Enhanced CollaborationView all 3 articles
The Super Spreadsheet: Collaborative Information Infrastructure in Translational Teams
Provisionally accepted
Shruthi Venkatesh*
Betsy Rolland- Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States
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Science teams rely on multiple types of information to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate on their research and operational endeavors. While the Science of Team Science (SciTS) offers robust literature on how such teams use and manage their data, we know relatively little about their collective information behaviors. This paper, the first in a series, reports findings from the Information Management Prototype for Clinical and Translational Research (IMPACT-CTR) study, which examines collaborative information infrastructure within one type of science team: clinical and translational research teams (CTRTs). We interviewed 48 team members across 10 U.S.-based teams. Analyses revealed that CTRTs progress through the research lifecycle of their collaborations by maneuvering several types of information dispersed across various tools, while simultaneously managing their individual information organizational styles in relation to those of their team members. Unlike data, the role of information in their work was often overlooked or undervalued. Teams with misaligned information management experienced time lags and slower project progress, whereas alignment fostered fluency in their work. By generating a typology of information and identifying tensions between individual and collective information practices, this study facilitates our understanding of how to support rigorous and reproducible team science practices in CTRTs.
Keywords: team science, translational teams, Information Management, collaboration, Collaboration infrastructure
Received: 14 Oct 2025; Accepted: 05 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Venkatesh and Rolland. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Shruthi Venkatesh
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